Slaughterhouse V Movie Review: Bare-ly Scraped Past A Zero

Robert Stephens
Mr. O’Brien
English IV
1 February 2013

Bare-ly Scraped Past A Zero

To begin, it must be established that I thought that Slaughterhouse Five was an absolutely awful piece of cinematography. The director utilized his right to artistic liberty with adapting this from the media of written work to film, however in some places I felt as if the artistic liberty was unwarranted and simply detracted from the story. Overall it captured the idea of the book in the fact that it lacked simple chronology, just as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote, but it defiled the book in the way that it either over or under-emphasized important characters, symbols, and events.
That being said, I believe one character that the movie DID capture sufficiently was Edgar Derby. During the scene in which Billy is placed into the POW hospital due to fainting, he awakens to find Lazzaro looming menacingly over him, which is when “Poor Old Edgar Derby” (As he’s called numerous times in the book and only once in the movie) comes to his aid. I feel that the Director utilized this scene well for the purpose of portraying the innocent and benevolent character that Vonnegut wrote him as. Unfortunately, this scene was-in my opinion-later compromised by the scene that is shown when the prisoners are first transported to Dresden, in which a misplaced Derby tries to assert his role as the “leader of the prisoners.” From my perspective, this gave too much of a bumbling air to character who was written as a rather smart and compassionate individual. Despite the slip up, the film does tie in more accurately with the book when the audience sees the Nazi officers execute Derby in cold blood for an act that could hardly be considered a crime by any standards.
With the exception of this singular character, I feel that the movie failed to do Vonnegut’s work true justice. Some of it can surely be attributed to the fact that in 1972 there was hardly enough technology to be able to recreate the effects from the book, but the rest is simply bad writing on the part of the script writers. The fact that conversations with Montana Wildhack were more extrapolated upon than the actual conversations with the Tralfamadorians is one of the few bothersome things that encompass the movie as a whole. And, being the proverbial icing on the cake, the ending of the movie is actually more lackluster than the book’s unsatisfying repetition of the bird-chirping motif. To be candid, the only thing that struck me as even slightly worth seeing in this movie was Ms. Wildhack’s exposed bosom.