Johnny Got His Gun (1971)

Nice effects though.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

"Johnny Got His Gun" is a fine film; a likely under-seen one. It was written and directed by the once blacklisted famed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who also wrote the source material - a novel that predates the film by more than three decades. The film is curiously mistitled as it is not a character named John(ny) who gets a gun but a fellow named Joe. In any event he volunteers to fight in World War I and sooner or later gets real messed up by an artillery shell. Like super messed up, like definitely better off dead messed up. The guy ends up just a slab of meat, as the character himself says - not dead but his life permanently ruined. His nonexistence-like existence a particularly cruel torture. He is unable to commit suicide and a kind nurse's eventual attempt at a mercy killing is thwarted. He spends his days feeling the vibrations around him; remembering the one time he played hide the sausage with his girlfriend; remembering losing the only thing in his dad's life that wasn't mediocre; remembering the cheap whore he picked up overseas; daydreaming about a tall, Canadian Jesus with long blond hair who basically just tells him he's screwed; longing to be part of a freak show, in which his limbless, jawless body would be displayed to people for nickels; and occasionally getting a hand job from the aforementioned nurse. It is a hopeless life, a life Joe comes to only want to escape. The film is an excellent, moving anti-war statement. An extremely depressing picture that makes you grateful to not be stuck in your own body and leaves you feeling full of compassion for people who have doubtless suffered a similar misfortune. It is a film about the very worse stuff of nightmares, the kind of nightmare that could happen in real life.

This film is almost hard to talk about. The Dalton Trumbo novel involves a man who has been dismantled in war. He is just a trunk and a head, with his body hanging on. He still has his sexual organs. He is immobile, of course, and dependent for everything on his caretakers. One young woman, a nurse, take pity on him and gives him a sexual experience. LIke any of us, he has dreams, but he is unable to express them to anyone. He needs stimulation but is kept in a dark room and approached on rare occasions. If there is a true nightmare, this would be it. The most devastating thing is that he is really young and will probably live a long time. We are kept involved with his thoughts through a kind of personal narration. It may be the saddest film I've ever seen.

Few films have left me so moved and shocked. I saw this film in passing, perhaps twice when I was in my teens. Half-hearted attempts to give it a name failed until I clicked through an IMDb list. It is gripping, moving and wonderfully told. You can never again lie awake in bed at night and not imagine how you would cope with such a nightmare. It poses so many questions about what it means to be alive, violent conflict, war, nursing and treatment and the right to live or die - even the 21st century question of what defines 'to be alive' and ways today to communicate through brain wave activity when there is nothing else to monitor. This should be seen by anyone with an interest in the First World War alongside documentaries, action thrillers, romances and comedy about conflict on this scale. As pertinent to those interested in the Second World War, indeed any conflict where a combatant is left horrendously broken and then kept in the quasi-statis of the undead.

Johnny Got His Gun (1971)I was devastated by the book, in the early 1970s, and yet this movie feels forced and a little cheesy. But this is purely because of how it was made, not for the story, which is terrifying both for the idea at its core, and for the way they carry it through. There might be some problems with the logic of what to show and from whose point of view. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is easily a way to approach this problem a little differently. Dalton Trumbo, the director and the writer here, relies heavily on flashbacks, and in a way we have a movie of a young man preparing to go to war, with his girlfriend more afraid than he is about, and a father with troubles of his own, a whole panoply of memories that make up a young man's life.. The narration by Timothy Bottoms (from the wounded soldier's head) has an awkward delivery--the words work, the voice less so.The book when I read it felt like a protest to the Vietnam war, even though it was published in 1939. The movie was meant, I'm sure, to target more specifically Vietnam, but now, in 2010, it's lost some of that immediacy, and it becomes a bit more abstract. It's also a bit of a moviemaker's exercise, due to the restriction of point of view (either literally, or through flashbacks).No amount of analyzing will remove the horrors of this situation. The movie lingers when you think it should move on, and it stutters at times with some less than convincing acting. But when the communication actually begins, it's quite a thrill. Trumbo is a writer and screenwriter, and maybe this wears at the overall effect of the film, as a film. As a story, it remains devastating.