![]() ![]() While I did enjoy both the book and the movie, I doubt I would have enjoyed the movie nearly as much without first having read the book the opposite cannot be said. This is true even for a relatively slim book like Slaughterhouse-Five. Slaughterhouse-Five, the movie, is another example of how, against all odds, the written word is indeed more powerful than cinematic images. And what a great opportunity was missed when the director and scriptwriters did not end the movie the same way the novel ends: with a little bird saying "poo-tee-weet." I wish, too, that the movie had included the scene in which Billy comes unstuck in time while watching an old war movie and ends up watching it run backward - a beautiful experience as the bombs, smoke, and flames appear to be sucked back up into the bombers and carried away (it even appears as if the bombs are taken back into factories where they are dismantled and disposed of safely).īut what I missed most of all was the narrator's observational phrase, used at dozens of key points in the novel: "so it goes." That would have made an excellent punctuation point for many of the scene breaks in the movie, but since no narrator is used in the film, those words were never heard. Also omitted from the movie is Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer Billy learns to love while in the hospital recovering from the trauma he experienced in World War II (a man Billy later befriends). Let's start with the fact that the movie focuses only on the Billy Pilgrim part of the story, and does not address the idea that in the book, Pilgrim's story is a novel within a novel. ![]() There are so many things missing from the movie, that it is difficult to know where to begin. Same result, different device to get there - perhaps changed simply to justify Derby's theft via his homesickness. For instance, in the book, Edgar Derby is executed for stealing the teapot he found in the firebombed ruins of Dresden in the movie, it is for stealing a small figurine that reminds him of home. What you see in the movie is pretty much what you read in the book, with a few relatively minor exceptions. Slaughterhouse-Five, the movie, is more notable for what it left out of Billy Pilgrim's story than for any major changes it made to the book's contents. I was happy enough with the way the scriptwriters (Vonnegut, among them) adapted the book to fit the big screen, but was once again reminded of how much more powerful a book almost always is when compared to its movie cousin. It was an interesting experience because I just finished re-reading the book earlier this week and its details were still fresh in my mind. forces into more and more remote places around the globe, Vonnegut crafted a story, Slaughterhouse Five, that would undermine the assumptions that the policymakers relied on and reveal the true nature of war.After stumbling across it on NetFlix, I stayed up late last night watching the 1972 film version of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. From his own experiences, Vonnegut knew that the Munich Syndrome and its application in WWII and after were fallacious, so while American policymakers led U.S. The explanations used to justify these interventions have become known collectively as the Munich Syndrome, which led American policymakers to believe that any aggression in the world had to be met with swift and unfaltering force. What happened in the intervening years to shape the novel that would eventually become Slaughterhouse Five? As Vonnegut grappled with his experiences for two decades, American leaders increased American involvement around the world. Although Vonnegut was liberated in 1945, the novel about the events he witnessed was not published until 1969. While fighting in Europe during WWII, Kurt Vonnegut was taken prisoner and sent to work at a German prison camp where he witnessed one of the most destructive events of WWII, the firebombing of Dresden, Germany by the Allied forces.
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