It’s the confusion.
That’s the glue binding Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the jet-black anti-war satire/stark military parade of nightmares that’s served as a rallying point for multiple generations of smart alecks. The contradictory nature of the U.S. Air Force bureaucracy, the circular manner in which the people surrounding bombardier John “YoYo” Yossarian speak, the mayhem of the Mediterranean theater of World War II—they’re what makes Catch-22 work, what allows an absurd surname like Aardvark to sit comfortably on the same pages that describe the monstrous actions of the character with the surname Aardvark. The novel walks a very fine line, and that line dips and dives and intersects with itself in ways that’ll leave heads aching, ribs sore, and tear ducts dry.
Hulu’s new Catch-22 miniseries might inspire similar feelings, minus the positive connotations. Minus the confusion, too: For one, writers Luke Davies and David Michôd untwist the novel’s chronology. They start their telling of Yossarian’s escapades at the beginning, when the airman (played by Christopher Abbott) is biding his time as a cadet, shtupping his commanding officer’s wife and operating under the assumption that the war will be over before he ever leaves flight training school. The trade-off for these dampened literary ambitions is that Catch-22 gets its major benefactor, director of two of its episodes, and biggest star into the premiere: After a brief feint toward disorder, the first clear voice in the sound mix is that of George Clooney, bearing the neatly trimmed mustache and raging perfectionism of the cuckolded Colonel Scheisskopf.
It’s the first indication that this will be a more straightforward version of Catch-22. The second comes as Yossarian and his fellow cadets receive pop-up name tags, not a preview of playful experiments in onscreen text to come, but rather a roll call for a cast that’s positively teeming with characters. It’s unfortunate: The closest the miniseries comes to replicating Heller’s integral sense of confusion is the interchangeability of the too-perfect 2010s faces populating its ranks.
Abbott’s print-editorial-ready mug is well suited for conveying Yossarian’s anguish as a discharge continually slips through his fingers and his friends wind up dead, missing, or some combination of the two. What those deep, soulful eyes are less equipped for is the comedy of the predicament, the maze of red tape and bomb-lines-as-defined-by-strings-on-maps that make the bombardier the unwitting pawn of prideful Colonel Cathcart (Kyle Chandler, playing the officer as a sort of mirror universe Coach Taylor). It’s a problem that infects most of Catch-22: Davies, Michôd, and the directing team of Clooney, Ellen Kuras, and Grant Heslov don’t seem to see what’s potentially funny about all of this, and some bright spots aside—moments of inspired physical comedy from the erstwhile Dr. Doug Ross; a properly crackling translation of the promotion and closed-door policy of the fortunately named Major Major Major (Lewis Pullman)—settle instead for a tone that’s less about the maddening pointlessness of war and more about its bloody horrors, complete with mournful instrumental score.
It’s like M*A*S*H, if that show kicked off at peak sanctimony; it’s Dunkirk with interludes of madcap war profiteering shenanigans starring the insidiously industrious mess officer Milo Minderbinder (Daniel David Stewart). Broadway vet Stewart is the only person enjoying themselves on-camera, rattling off soliloquies about the virtues of capitalism and explaining his wheelings and dealings while guns are pointed in his direction and bombs detonate in the background. He’s the grinning, morally compromised agent of chaos the miniseries needs, and could’ve used more of.
Instead, Catch-22 is defined by the sickly pallor of its visual palette (a jaundiced tint that at least goes with Yossarian’s point of view and phony liver pains) and the way it makes the slog of its characters’ deployment a little too literal. There’s palpable peril in the squadron’s ever-mounting bombing runs, and Cathcart’s moving target of a mission quota makes a clever parallel to contemporary America’s Forever War, but the flight sequences wind up acquiring a deadening repetitiousness. On the ground, there are reduced roles for the supporting cast of kooks stationed on the island of Pianosa. Hugh Laurie is on hand, but just barely, as horseshoe-pitching Major de Coverley; Jay Paulson is but a blip on the radar as the chaplain.
And while it occasionally conjures the knotty density of its source—typically during the novel’s most celebrated passages, like the one that explains its titular contradiction—the unifying absurdist jumble never falls totally into place. It’s uncommonly tricky material, much of its humor wrapped up in wordplay, many of its characters allegorical sketches. Hulu’s Catch-22 tries to address the latter by bumping up the pathos, but that just makes the miniseries less enjoyable to watch. (The Handmaid’s Tale is harrowing, too, but at least Reed Morano give it a visual distinctiveness. The fact that Catch-22 looks the way it does, despite a third of it being directed by the woman who shot Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, is a real letdown.) Clooney and team aren’t the first to have Heller’s novel get the best of them; Mike Nichols and Buck Henry followed up their collaboration on The Graduate with a fascinatingly flawed (and also chronologically uncomplicated) big-screen Catch-22. Perhaps the real catch-22 is this: That a novel whose dialogue is begging to be spoken out loud, whose backdrop is so traditionally cinematic, is fundamentally unadaptable.
148 Comments
I think of Dunbar when I’m stuck in a maddeningly boring class/meeting/waiting room.It comforts me that at least I’m living longer.
Ha! I love Catch-22, and this is the first passage I always return to when thinking of the novel. Great stuff.
I don’t know how many people would think of Dunbar when they consider the novel’s great characters, and he’s certainly not as major a player as some others, but I always thought he was so brilliantly realised in just a few scenes. This tired, bitter guy whose only goal is to live the dullest, and therefore longest, life imaginable.
I don’t know how many times I’ve read Catch-22, but I’ve always imagined it would make a great miniseries… but only in capable hands. I’ll have to give this a whirl. Although this review – especially the mention that the timeline has been conventionalized – lowers my expectations enormously.
I feel like it would be better served if it were presented like a sketch comedy show, except characters and settings keep recurring through different sketches, until over time we start to get to know them well, and all the stuff that happens to them starts getting tinged with pathos as well as comedy.
I’ll watch just to see Hugh Laurie say, “Gimme eat.”
What about the brutal sequence in which the cackling old degenerate throws a flower right in Major— de Coverly’s eye? Hopefully they do that passage justice.
“Give everybody eat.”
As a huge fan of the movie, I was skeptical until I saw the trailer. All due respect to the reviewer, but I’m going to keep my optimism intact.Also looking for the moment when Clooney says, “Damn, we’re in a tight spot… like one’a them Catch 22s!”
It does need a lot more than the standard Hollywood 90-120 minutes to do it justice.
Catch-22 is the Peanuts of novels; an entire generation insists it’s hilarious and meaningful and I just don’t get it.
None of Hulu’s originals interest me. I tried the first couple of episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale and it just depress me.
Bummer. Clooney, both as director and actor, seemed like a good fit for the material.
Seems like the producers thought so too. Reminds me of a bit of writing advice: whenever you fall in love with a beautiful sentence, delete it immediately. Because if you keep it, you’re going to mess everything up around it by trying to keep it exactly as it is. Apparently the producers fell in love with the idea of opening with Clooney’s Scheisskopf.
That’s one of the dumbest pieces of writing advice I’ve ever heard.
It’s the Kill Your Darlings mantra, which has been taken to heart far too much, in my opinion, by creative writing teachers. I think it was originally meant to suggest that you should think critically about your own writing and consider whether your love of something might be blinding you to its value, or lack thereof. But now it’s become this utterly useless bit of faux-wisdom that seems to translate into “make sure there is nothing distinctive or unusual about your writing style.”
I’ve always seen it as useful advice when it comes to being edited. While I still like it when I turn a nice phrase, I don’t fall in love with my prose. If there’s a better way to say it I’m game.
Yeah, “Kill your Darlings” is important, but like everything else these days it’s been expanded and stretched into nonsense.
It’s about the editing process, not the writing process. (Never delete ANYTHING during the writing process, that way lies madness . . . and never finishing anything.) When you find yourself completely in love with some absolutely elegant sentence or paragraph or whatever that you’ve written, your natural inclination is to twist yourself into knots to try to keep it even if, during the revision process, it no longer fits the story you’re telling. “Kill your darlings” is a way to avoid falling into that trap. Be extra critical of that beautiful phrase you love so much. Does it REALLY fit? Is it REALLY necessary? Does the story hold up if you rip it out? More often than not those beautiful turns of phrase end up as little more than writerly masturbation and don’t actually contribute.
It’s kind of been misunderstood in the same way as method acting. That’s meant to be, “Ask yourself questions about how this character would react to certain things happening in their life and work it into your performance”, not “send your co-workers dead rodents and opened condoms.”
Yeah, “method acting” is just about putting yourself in the emotional place as your character so that you don’t really need to “act”. Your emotional response is the same as the character so you’re coming from a real place and just reacting naturally instead of faking it.
That’s a long, LONG way from just being a shithead and harassing your co-workers.
How do you get from “A” to “[it makes] sure there is nothing distinctive or unusual about your writing style”?
That’s just been my experience from seeing people apply the rule. They get over-cautious about distinctive elements of their writing and start thinking of them as “darlings” to be removed. After that, all they’re left with is fairly workmanlike prose that seems like an imitation of the general trends in writing. Your results may vary.
It’s not for everyone, since everyone’s process is different. If it doesn’t help you, ignore it. Anecdotally, IME, the people who need to heed this advice the most are usually the ones most resistant to it 😉
Before I read any replies to this comment I was thinking this is one of the best pieces of writing advice I ever heard. Seriously. It gets me. Wish I’d heard it sooner. Thanks for sharing.
The familiar version of that is usually attributed to William Faulkner, though something earlier from Samuel Johnson is quite similar:‘Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.’(Which might well be much more a jibe at one person’s taste rather than general advice.)
Yeah after Monuments Men I really doubt that we would like another WWII thing starring George Clooney.Can he just start running for politics already?
No because everyone he ever fucked both literally and figuratively will come out of the woodwork for their 15 minutes.
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
I don’t care either way, it’s just what will happen.
Monuments Men, with an amazing cast, was so boring.
What I really want to know about this adaptation: is Major _____ de Coverley’s name pronounced as “Major *(BLEEP)* de Coverley”?
I’m guessing they just dropped the ____ completely, since it’s been “de Coverly” in every single thing I’ve read about it.One of my lit professors suggested “Blank de Coverly,” and that’s how I think about it today. I don’t remember his reasoning for it, but he did have some.
Well, there’s apparently a tradition in Jane Austen adaptations of, when the action is set in “—-shire”, having the characters actually call it “Blankshire”.
I always imagined there should just be a half-beat of strained silence, like someone trying to stifle a sneeze, between “major” and “de”.
Ha! That’s so much better
That’s how I always read it.
In the book the reason he wasn’t given a first name is because he was so scary-looking no one dared ask him what it was. Unless this miniseries is going with the idea that Hugh Laurie is just that scary-looking, I doubt they’d keep the no-first-name joke.
I’m kind of annoyed he isn’t more Jewish.
Yosarian?
I’ll probably watch this anyway, but… no danger of doing that any time soon since I don’t have Hulu. Kind of a disappointing review — but hell. Good cast, great source material.I think I’m in the minority in that I really like the 1970 movie? Alan Arkin was perfect and so was pretty much everyone else, and I liked what Nichols did with the story: despite an unconventional narrative, he still managed to propel the action downward to hell, in a way…
I love that movie. The book is absolutely, bar none, without contest my second favorite book ever, and I don’t think the Nichols adaptation captures it, but I still love that movie.
what’s number one on that list?
Under the Volcano
Agreed, there is too much flavor in Catch-22 to catch in a film or TV series but I enjoy the film nonetheless. A fantastic cast, catches some flavor of the book, and they had all of those B-25’s actually flying in the movie.I recommend the book often and especially to those in the military. I read it when I was in the Army and I learned the book is much more truth than satire.
the book is so good, the nichols movie is a letdown.
Catch-22 is the book that “turned” me. My father, uncles and brothers were all big military guys, rah-rah, and that’s the life I knew. And then I read this and was like hmmmmm. I remember trying to read my book report in sophomore English and I just kept giggling and telling my classmates…no, no this is serious business. A great memory for me. I’m curious, what’s your favorite book?
It’s Under the Volcano.
It’s Under the Volcano.
I’ll quote you with one edit: “The book is absolutely, bar none, without contest my favorite book ever,…”
Nope, it was great. It wasn’t perfect but you want perfect, read the book instead.
I’m with you on the movie. And the clip that I saw of this miniseries where the titular Catch is discussed wasn’t as good as the version there.
Also how do you beat the movies cast? Arkin is Yossarian and how I picture him always. So many great actors.
Alan Arkin is and will always be Yossarian for me. Love that movie.
Same. And Cathcart will always be Martin Balsam, and Korn will forever be Buck Henry, and Jack Gilford is Doc Daneeka. Still, the movie wasn’t successful in my mind. Was there even a Dunbar character in the movie? Chief White Halfoat? You can’t do a sweeping novel like Catch-22 justice in 2 hours. Or 6. Or probably at all.
You’re not alone. I think being compared to the 1970 film will be the source of a lot of the miniseries’ criticism. That and the length – while the two hour movie was a little too short, six episodes might prove to be too long.
I have this scene memorized.
How in the hell do I not remember Bob Newhart or Tony Perkins being in this?
You’re not some historian or anything!
Tony Perkins has what might be my favorite little moment in the film. When he’s being driven to headquarters by Colonel Korn, he’s trying desperately to get through the colonel’s hectoring and finally he starts his speech about how Korn doesn’t have to call him Father, and Korn says something about the chaplain being a captain, and for a second there’s this look of hope on Perkins’ face, and then Korn says “And I’m a Lieutenant Colonel, am I correct so far?” And Perkins’ face just falls so perfectly, in a way that says, welp I thought I could make a difference but I’m just going to get pissed on again like always. It’s a lovely little couple of seconds of acting.
When I read the book I was in the Army and I could see someone named Major getting promoted like that with no problem.
I remember laughing so hard I was sobbing in public the first time I read about Major Major Major Major, and then trying to explain to my then boyfriend and not even being able to get the words out.
“I have named him Caleb in accordance with your wishes.” That’s from memory, but yeah, it’s a funny scene.
I think the way it’s structured makes the novel virtually unfilmable, which makes the movie turning out to be not just watchable but legitimately great in parts a minor miracle.I’m personally a sucker for the DVD commentary, a conversation between Mike Nichols and some young up-and-comer named Steven Soderbergh.
Oddly Alan Arkin claims he never saw the finished movie, and was surprised when he later found that it had such a hostile reception.
I once had occasion to chat with Arkin about the movie. He seemed to think it was pretty good, or maybe he was just humoring me.
Ah? The subject was raised in an interview around the time of Little Miss Sunshine. I don’t know if he meant he didn’t see it at the time, and it was a very heavily promoted movie, and may have subsequently watched it. I think it’s really pretty good. The Guardian are certainly more enthusiastic about this mini-series than the AV Club.https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/may/16/catch-22-review-george-clooneys-dizzying-daring-triumph
The movie was interesting in what it tried to do… I think it kinda failed in that attempt but it at least tried.
I didn’t expect to like it, but I do. I think it works better as a stage play, though. Ultimately, however, the best format was novel, just like comic book was the best format for all things Moore.
I just rewatched the movie in anticipation of this and while we might be the minority, you’re not the only one. The whole cast is amazing but goddamn I love Alan Arkin as Yossarian.
But… where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
Moreover, why is Hitler?
Where is that stooped and mealy colored old man I used to call Poppa when the merry go round broke down?
T.S. Eliot.
BALLS!
Love that there are Catch-22 fans who are as crazy about it as I!
Hoho beriberi
But what can you do? {shrugs}
The movie may have been a mess but Alan Arkin will always be Yossarian to me.
Mr. Nichols’ movie is far better than it is generally thought of — and it does present narrative in a generally non-chronological manner; the story-telling and the character portrayals are so strong and assure that the various jumps in time – – back and forth – – don’t confuse but rather serve the comic timing and the key dramatic moments (such as the recurring gradual reveal of Snowden’s fate).
I guess I’m still not signing up for Hulu yet.
So it sounds like you guys won’t be doing episode recaps and reviews then? That’s a shame. Gives me all the more reason to watch the whole thing.
Clooney is “Colonel” Sheisskopf?! For real?In the trailer from which the image above is pulled, the scene is (or is based on) Clevinger’s disciplinary hearing, which I can tell because Clooney does the “Read me back the last line” gag.And that’s not what Scheisskopf says, that’s what the bloated colonel with the big fat moustache at Clevinger’s disciplinary hearing says.Also Scheisskopf is a Lieutenant and a fairly prissy one who mostly cares about the men doing really perfect parades, but won’t whip his wife (to the scorn of other Lieutenants).I get that they need to combine characters and such, but were they really so in love with the “hilarious” name Scheisskopf that they decided to use it for a character that is absolutely nothing like the Scheisskopf in the book?
Clooney is “Colonel” Sheisskopf?! For real?What a shithead.
Well, he does eventually end up a General…
Mike Nichol’s Catch-22 is both my favorite Nichols film as well as my favorite war comedy. I have no idea how Altman’s M*A*S*H became so much more successful.
Because M*A*S*H was about Vietnam. Although the book was set in the Korean war, and the TV show was set in the Korean war, the movie never explicitly said it was set in the Korean war. That left it open to interpretation, and many assumed it was about the Vietnam war.
No.
Except for the entire episode they set where Hawkeye takes a jeep to Panmunjom to interrupt the Peace Talks.
Uhhh what? I was 5 when I became aware of MASH and knew it was set during the Korean War.
It was set in Korea but definitely about Vietnam.
There was an AV Club article a few years ago about the gross sexism and misogyny in M*A*S*H the movie. The comments section was lit.
Not surprising. As I recall, there were no female characters, just sex objects. Poor Sally Kellerman.
Football!
the pic above of Clooney is bizarre from the neck up. What is going on there?
Looks like he’s on a hunger strike.
Some great books defy adequate screen adaptation. It’s hard to really unpack a story as complicated Catch-22 and stuff it into two hours – something invariably has to be left out. And adapting it into a miniseries creates another dilemma – including so much of the novel’s minutiae that it bogs down on the screen.Another problem the miniseries is going to face is comparison with the 1970 film. For me, Alan Arkin will always be Yossarian, Jon Voight will always be Milo Minderbinder and Bob Newhart will always be Major Major.While I personally found Nichols’ adaptation entertaining, by necessity it did gloss over chunks of the book. I’m probably going to enjoy the new miniseries but I’m expecting it to be more like real war – stretches of boredom punctuated by terror, with a few laughs thrown in.
I think Erik’s comment about the too-pretty cast is spot on. Aside from Laurie, Clooney, and Chandler, it seems like everyone else could be interchangable, no rough edges or quirky features. No booze or cigarettes to muss anything up. Compare that to the 1970 movie, which is a murderer’s row of legendary character actors, each of whom uniquely inhabit their role. There aren’t really many distinctive-looking character actors anymore. I will also give this a chance, to see whether I am prejudging too harshly.
I agree. The 1970 cast was AWESOME, which makes it even more inexplicable that it didn’t do better at the box office.The new cast may turn out to be fine actors, but they look like they were randomly chosen from cologne ads.
As someone who literally used Warren Oates as his user name, I fully get what you mean.
Six hours vs the two-hour 1970 movie? Having seen it, I can say the movie is still better. Kinda like The Name of the Rose, which was made into an eight episode mini-series earlier this year by Italy/Germany, and was NOT better than the two-hour 1986 movie.
I agree. Screenwriters can’t include everything, so compromises have to be made, scenes have to be cut. The difference in whether it a good or bad adaptation is in which scenes are cut.By the same token, it’s possible to include too much and bore the audience.
Balance is very important in adaptations.And regarding too much boring the audience, I saw the new John Wick a couple of days ago, and there are so many scenes of killing that after a while it became boring. Can you imagine that? It had long protracted scenes of killing that added little to the story and were practically boring. That’s why good editors win Oscars.
I honestly didn’t expect that a TV show could capture the spirit of the book, but I held on to hope anyway. Sad to hear it doesn’t seem to have worked. On the plus side, I did a Google image search for Lewis Pullman and one for Henry Fonda, and there is a passable resemblance.
I think Catch 22 is adaptable, but it needs to be done by a director willing to be irreverent, both to the source material, and to systems and authority in general, which are qualities that aren’t exactly conducive to longevity within the studio system. They’ve got to be unafraid to monkey with the material, which is easier said than done, such is the reverence for the booklIn a way, Catch 22 has already been made in a successful fashion, in the aforementioned M*A*S*H, which was filmed at the same time at Catch-22, and produced by the same studio. The latter received all the attention being a prestige picture, and M*A*S*H was made more or less under the radar, with astonishing results.
I think a young Robert Altman would’ve been the ideal director to adapt this story, given that he was a pilot who actually did what Yossarian never managed to do: make it through all his required flights and get a ticket home. Absent that, Alex Cox might have also been a good choice, having tackled similar material in his underrated “Walker.” Or perhaps Werner Herzog. Or, the more I think about it, Oliver Stone might be an interesting choice as well. He has a wicked sense of humor, and no one does bombast like he does.
Noah Hawley or Michel Gondry maybe? I watched the trailer for this and the sepia every gave me doubts. I wasn’t really excited about George Clooney either, he’s fine, but his involvement made me think it’s just not going to odd enough. This review is kinda how I thought it would be. A shame because it makes sense to be done as a series, but I don’t think I’ll watch it.
George Miller would be a dream choice for me. A guy who can do both Babe and Mad Max would be able to bring all of Catch 22 to life, in my opinion.
That’d be cool, but he so rarely makes movies nowadays and for a while. I’d actually just like him to make something. Anything honestly, ok maybe not a romcom, but you know what I’d probably give a shot.
I’ve kind of grown weary of Clooney-backed projects. He makes interesting choices but the delivery seldom seems to be there.
Christopher Nolan?
I mention this elsewhere in the thread, but ideally Catch-22 should be adapted by Stoppard and filmed by somebody good with theatre adaptions. It’s the vaudevillian futility of Absurd that always gets lost.
Blackadder Goes Forth.
I read the book MASH and it was mostly pretty bad, and that may have freed Altman from worrying about faithfulness to the book. Wikipedia quotes the screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. to something along those lines.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie Catch 22, but I recall I had a problem that it tended to focus on the absurdity of war when Heller was really talking about the madness of it. The movie, I seem to remember, didn’t really capture the brutality and horror that Yossarian was experiencing. Which meant that Yossarian was closer to Ben in The Graduate, someone who didn’t fit in with an essentially comic world, rather than a guy trapped in truly desperate straits.
Roger Ebert’s review of the movie crystallized in my mind that the movie wasn’t about war at all. It was existential, the conundrum that we’ll all die. Yossarian is worried about dying in war, but mostly he’s worried about dying. It’s worth a read https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/catch-22-1970
“but I recall I had a problem that it tended to focus on the absurdity of war when Heller was really talking about the madness of it.”It actually skeeves me out a bit that so meant people have such fond memories of the book. I mean, it’s a great book, and it was very funny in points, but I walked away from the whole experience of reading it with sort of the emotional equivalent of my stomach churning.
This right here is dead-on. I’ve always thought that the M*A*S*H* movie had all the wild silly madcap irreverence of Catch 22 the book. M*A*S*H* the book is not nearly as good as the movie. I always point to it as a case of a movie being better than the book. Arkin is the perfect Yoyo, but the movies tone wasn’t as wild and madcap as the book. M*A*S*H* is exactly that.
Even maybe someone like Adam McKay, though I wasn’t a huge fan of The Big Short despite really liking the book.
I knew this was going to be a thematic failure when I noticed Hulu was running ads that combined this with Chevy trucks.
Whenever someone mentions the Mike Nichols movie they inevitably throw up that term ‘flawed’ as though it’s unquestioned conventional wisdom. Flawed compared to what? What, in your opinion makes it a not-alltime-great film? That films’ stuck with me my whole life while supposedly ‘superior’ films of the era have been forgotten.And as an aside, the pre-air review of Fosse Vernon got a C too, though individual episodes have been rated as As and Bs.
Flawed compared to the book is what I always assumed.
If this sucks I will be furious. My favorite book ruined. Ugh. I am a veteran with (minimal) combat experience and Heller NAILED the military experience for those few free-thinkers in the ranks. Yeah, the stereotype of the robot automatons simy following orders is true to a degree BUT the madcap misfits of Catch-22 also exist and thrive and I was fortunate(?) enough to be in a unit similar (vaguely) to Yossarian’s. Anyway…. I hope this review sucks more than the miniseries but…….AV Club and the writers generally get it. Is it possible to have premature disappointment?
One of the most beautiful things about the novel is the twisted chronology, the slow unfolding of meaning as the events move forward, and back, and turn back in on themselves, leaving us to question everything until it all falls tragically into place. I’m sorry that they unraveled it.Ou sont les Neigedens d’antan?
That is a very weird-looking picture of Clooney.
Seriously why are you not covering Chernobyl
Yeah, the fallout of this omission is grievous
Best show I’ve seen in years. Frightening. I think it must be seen by all high-schoolers.
Fired up Hulu to watch something else, and it was preceded by a GMC promotional tie-in to this. It was really jarring, because it was showing shots of GMC trucks interspersed with scenes of some of the air combat from the show, and a straightforward voiceover about “leading and not following” and being “professional grade.” It was almost as if GMC made the decision to sponsor the series without knowing what it’s really about.
Came here to post about this exact thing, but was pretty sure it was Ford. Regardless, the promo really, really misunderstands the material it’s tying into. There’s a line in it something like, “take time to remember those who put it all on the line”—not an exact quote but definitely some mindless “Hail to the Troops” claptrap that is diametrically opposed to the spirit of Catch-22.
Yeah, whoever it was, Catch-22 is not the place for a “Whoo! ’Merica! Buy our trucks!” ad. It’s like tacking a “Buy war bonds!” ad on at the end of Platoon.
A lot of truck shoppers who end up watching this based on seeing that ad are going to be hella confused.
Reminds me of politicians who take their rally stages to Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” like they have no idea what the song even means.
I thought about exactly that too. Wasn’t that Reagan’s campaign song?
The disjointed timeline is what makes the story.
…with (someone) [indeed]
Orr is the smartest fucking person in the Med theater. A god damn genius
hang on, speaking of absurd names: is Milo Minderbinder played by Daniel David Stewart or is Daniel David Stewart playing Milo Minderbinder? wait…
I think the key to adapting Catch-22 is recognizing that while it is a satire and a war story, it fundamentally belongs to the Absurd. It’s got more in common with Beckett & Stoppard than M*A*S*H.
In fact, get Tom Stoppard to write it, and get a skilled hand to film it as if it were a theatrical adaptation. The war setting leads filmmakers toward spectacle and wide open spaces when everything—Pianosa, the hospital, Snowden’s plane, the nightmare of Rome—should be tightly, uncomfortably filmed to emphasize the sense that it’s all a trap. It’s a helluva catch, not a Mediterranean holiday.
Have you seen the M*A*S*H* movie? Absurdity is the core of the thing. The show is a different story altogether, but the movie is high absurdity. I do agree on getting Stoppard to adapt it though.
Man, this looks good and I like George Clooney, but this review makes it out to sound pretty bad and I usually trust Erik Adams. It’s like I’m caught in some kind of… Catch 22.
“The contradictory nature of the U.S. Air Force bureaucracy…”I hate to be that guy, but at that time the U.S. Air Force didn’t exist; it was the U.S. Army Air Corp. The Air Force was formed in 1947, two years after the war ended.
Fully embracing my inner pedantic asshole: Due to insufficient support and command structure in the Army, the U.S. Army Air Corps became completely superfluous and existing-in-name-only in March 1942. By the time we were in the thick of the war, airmen served in the U.S. Army Air Force(s). While technically the AAC continued to exist until 1947, the de facto command structure and common usage all referred to the USAAF.
They’ve been running ads on Hulu for GMC trucks that use this show as a tie in. They portray the show as if it’s some sort of celebration of the military which…yeah, it’s not that
I read the book in high school and again just a little while ago. The thing I couldn’t appreciate very well when I was 15 is that it’s really fucking funny. Any adaptation that is less than a black comedy would be a disservice.
This wonderful book remains unfilmable.
Good cast, amazing visual effects, but this was a bit all over the place. The dark humor coupled with the horrific very graphic deaths. Been a while since reading Heller’s novel, but this felt like a wasted opportunity.
I don’t know if you’re referring to the movie or the miniseries, though the book flipped back and forth between absurd humor and horror as well.
Yes, like I said, I haven’t re-read the novel for a while now. I just wished they had kept the humor dark rather than goofy. George Clooney’s character, for example.
I binge watched the whole series (there’s 6 episodes) this weekend. I loved it.
It’s been years since I’ve read the book (which, as an angry, anti-authoritarian teen served me more for aesthetic than for substance, as I was so young) but felt the series worked on it’s own merits.
Yes, it’s flawed, but it works, and is great as a mini-series.
I felt moved by much of it, and found the filming had a necessarily surreal quality, while the cast was fantastic.
I’m not one to just binge anything, so to me it was excellent.
BIG fan of the book. Discovered the mini-series the other night completely by accident. Starting watching the first episode expecting to be very disappointed. Crazy thing is, I didn’t hate it. There’s potential there. The cast is good. The mixed up chronology is not there, but I don’t think it’s necessary. Not funny enough, or really at all, is my biggest gripe so far. The bombing runs are surprisingly realistic and horrible. Better than what my feeble imagination could come up with reading the book. I’m going to stick with it. If nothing else, it’ll inspire me to read the book again.