I am extremely surprised at most of the reviews submitted here. It is as if the Americans are really as our (stupid) stereotypes paint them: unimaginative, uneducated, dull, practical.
Questions spring to mind: would they enjoy "The Little Prince" by Saint-Exupery? Would they say that it's silly? Did they ever read or heard a poem of any kind? Did they ever read Remarque or Dos Passos or saw Deer Hunter or anything good? Did they literally took apart every fictional movie or book they saw by the criteria of factual consistency, realism and strict adherence to genre? I really, really don't understand people that criticize a movie about war because there were not enough explosions or bomb craters in it. I refuse to believe that they never had seen a good movie about war without action heroics (we certainly have, Soviet cinema did a lot of nice and gentle (and popular) dramas and humane comedies about war). It's like criticizing a comedy for the lack of good old-fashioned clowns in it.
And most of all it surprises me that even the social context doesn't push them in the right direction. A couple of guys here saw the film at an art-house festival. I imagine that they would be OK with the most absurd and gory things if someone put a "trash" and "experimental" and "surreal" stickers on the poster. But war films, they are about tactics and M1s, right? I think the musical numbers in the film are the most beautiful part of it: they set the tone for the lengthy and disjointed dialogue about Atlantis and whatnot. They are obviously efficient at 1) bringing out the sensitive in young soldiers without heaping macho melodrama; 2) exploring the androgyny of a soldier (an interesting theme); and 3) just evoking the "war is a silly, strange place to be for all of us, but were are here" Vonnegut kind of feeling.
I wonder if other reviewers read Vonnegut.
