SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (film)

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (sometimes spelled without hyphen). George Roy Hill, dir. USA: Universal, 1971 (completion), 1972 (US release). Based on K. Vonnegut, Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, q.v. under Fiction.

Retains in attenuated form a question raised in Vonnegut's novel: Do humans have free will, or are we merely machines, doomed to do what we do because "the moment is structured that way." Also retains Billy Pilgrim's cage in the Tralfamadorian zoo as a very homey sort of mechanical womb. Note that in the film, the Tralfamadorian zoo has an aural and visual reality less than, say, the highly detailed shots in Dresden — but has a fair degree of reality. Hence, in the film it is far less clear than in the novel that Billy Pilgrim is delusional (and dangerous). So the novel is anti-science-fictional whereas the film is, in part, S.F. — but the film's visuals of the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombing make an anti-war point as strong as that of the novel, or stronger.