![]() ![]() In the second half, he tells us war is evil and causes human suffering. In the first half of the movie, he tells us officers are dumb and war doesn't make sense. No, Nichols avoids those hard things altogether, and tries to distract us with razzle-dazzle while he sneaks in a couple of easy messages instead. The movie recites speeches and passages from the novel, but doesn't explain them or make them part of its style. Nichols doesn't even try if we are to understand Catch-22 and all the other catches, we just have to be familiar with the book. This sort of Alice-in-Wonderland logic is at the heart of Heller's book, and somehow he keeps it going. You'd have to be crazy to want to fly dangerous missions over Italy and maybe get killed, right? But Yossarian didn't want to fly those missions. When Yossarian claimed insanity in hopes of being shipped home, Doc Daneeka explained his mistake. Now that seems like sound reasoning, but (understandably) it doesn't work with most armies. ![]() Why? Because they were shooting at him and someday they would hit him and he would die. ![]() Yossarian didn't want to fly any more missions over Italy. Everything in the book was crazy because it made sense, a paradox illustrated in the case of Yossarian, the hero. ![]() His challenge in directing the movie was to somehow catch Heller's tone, that delicate balance between insanity and ice cold logic. ![]()
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