Catch-22

Captain Yossarian has a problem. The government of the United States wants to win the war, the officers want a career and recognition, and Yossarian wants to survive first and foremost. These, as you will agree, are not completely identical goals, especially when Yossarian, with each unnecessary death and every example of the decay of moral values, loses more and more of his ideals and grows disgusted with the callousness and manipulation of the commanding officers. Yossarian is the opposite of exemplary, conscious heroes of war stories about courage and honor. Yossarian does not initially understand the madness around him, but the more he sees it, the more he desires to get rid of it and arrange things his own way. While watching the film, I appreciated the irony, situational comedy, and mockery of the traditional, pathetic concept of war, and yet I fully appreciated Nichols' film only after getting acquainted with the eponymous series. The film does not shy away from things, it is more apt, and I feel a greater presence of the author of the source material, Joseph Heller, in it. By the way, at the time of its creation, which dates back to the Vietnam War, a number of leading American film critics had a problem with the film, specifically with its protagonist. They considered him to be an amoral coward who undermined the anti-Nazi war effort. However, I completely understand Yossarian and his intentions. Overall impression: 90%. (04.02.2021)

The confusion in which I was lost, like Captain Yossarian, was not a confusion of war, but a confusion of screenwriting. I saw a number of great scenes, hilariously funny, absurd, and chilling, but in the end I felt that many of them I didn't even need to see – that they were almost unnecessary and that Catch-22 would have had to be much longer to properly integrate them into the plot and make all those strange characters in uniforms real characters. Nevertheless, it's an indictment of war and the stellar cast is indeed stellar. (23.06.2019)

When I finished watching this movie, I thought I should finally read the book, because it intrigues me. Catch-22 continues in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and manages to be excellently critical as well as extremely funny. Not many anti-war films can do that quite like this one. (14.10.2016)