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Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks), a successful optopometrist well into the
second half of his life, has just survived a plane crash while his wife
(Sharon Gans) has died in a car accident - when he's convinced he's
abducted to another planet, Tralfamadore, where the aliens who are all
mind convince him that he's "unstuck in time" and able to travel
back and forth between all points in his life (including his death) ...
and they also give him a Hollywood starlet (Valerie Perrine) to mate with.
But of course, this might all only be the result of a long gestating post
traumatic stress disorder, a remnant from World War 2, where he, a
pacifist, served as a chaplain's assistant, but was captured by the
Germans and thrown into a prison camp, where he soon attracted the wrath
of fellow American prisoner Lazzaro (Ron Leibman), who promises to one day
kill him - and that's only on top of all the other cruelties of a prison
camp he's exposed to - including the bombing of Dresden, which not only
leaves the town in ruins, but Billy and company are also tasked with
corpse removal. And eventually, Billy even witnesses his fatherly wartime
buddy Derby (Eugene Roche) shot dead by the Germans. Billy returns to the
US outwardly unscathed, but never seems fully able to lead a normal life,
until the conviction about his abduction to Tralfamadore gives him new
direction ... If after reading above synopsis you might say
"this doesn't make a whole lot of sense" - then pretty much,
you've got it: Slaughterhouse-Five isn't your typical genre movie
where there's a resolution in the end that explains everything, and the
hero is vindicated one way or another, where everything's neatly packaged
and labelled. Heck, this movie doesn't even follow a linear narrative
structure and jumps back and forth in a very associative manner pretty
much all the time - and all of this works just beautifully, basically
because the film's very cleverly written (including and maybe especially
the rather campy scenes on planet Tralfamadore), it's expertly structured
in a way that makes sense of all the non-sense, it's beautifully filmed,
and George Roy Hill's direction shows just the right playfulness for the
material. The outcome then is a truly fascinating movie that's not to be
missed!
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