Johnny Got His Gun

A quadriplegic, who also lost most of his face from a WW1 bomb during that conflict, leaves us under no illusion of the futility of war and the insanity of those who lead us into them. As impacting a film as you're ever likely to see.

If you are at all squeamish than please avoid seeing Johnny Got His Gun. Not there is anything to see that is particularly, but Timothy Bottoms character in and of himself is one frightening example of what can come out of war and should it.

The unkindest cut of all is minutes before the armistice was declared in operation and the guns ceased, Timothy Bottoms receives a blast from a mortar shell. Everything that makes one relate to what's around is now gone from him, four limbs, the windows to the senses all gone. But more of his brain is intact than the doctors realize and the film is narrated by Bottoms trying to communicate and also his memories of much better times before the Great War.

Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten had been back working for over a decade now from the blacklist, but here he was not writing a script but also was the director filming his own novel. No doubt certain people were looking for a hidden subversive message. But the only message that Johnny Got His Gun delivers is war is very bad thing and does terrible things to some human bodies.

Of course the title is a past tense of that opening verse of George M. Cohan's period flag waver Over There. So many young men from so many countries marched to war with those songs thinking war was some kind of honor thing. Honor if there ever was any in war was lost in that conflict where automatic weapons, poison gas, and the tank came to the fore. Kids with 19th century ideals like Bottoms as we see his reminiscences came up against something that flag waving nostrums didn't take into account.

Bottoms is brilliant in the film that first gave him stardom and the rest of the cast performs well. Credit goes to Dalton Trumbo for a necessary, but harrowing piece of cinema.

Let me say that I would NOT recommend this to anyone lightly. I feel quite confident saying that there are very few people I know who I think should see it.

It's all about the horror of war. The setting is WWI and involves a very young man, boy really, who has no appendages because of a grenade. The rest of the moving cuts between his horrific vegetative physical state with voice-overs of his thoughts and flashbacks to his rather limited life experiences and a few fantasies or inner monologues.

This was really a soul-shattering movie in a lot of ways. After watching it I couldn't get it out of my head for hours after hours. I couldn't' get to sleep until mid way through the next day. It is just relentlessly brutal in giving detail of true internal psychological torture, seeing a wasted life sacrificed.

I didn't read the book, which I've been told is even more dramatic than the film. I honestly can't imagine that. I don't think I could read the book. Parts of it make me think of "All Quiet on the Western Front" but in far more isolated ways. There's no glory here.

Donald Sutherland's Christ is a fascinating character and compelling. Joe's flashbacks are all meaningful and relate to the "big questions" he's trying to sort out that only seem to provide answer that torture him even more. The scene with his girlfriend early in the movie when the old man says "don't make a whore out of her" is profound in its delivery.

It is fairly artistic in a very dark sense. It's too heavy for some people. They will claim it was boring but that is only for those who have no understanding of the weight of the matters because it doesn't involve them. Make no mistake, this sort of thing goes on every day as there are wars every day.

I'm all about defending and fighting for personal rights, but if this movie were shown in every public school in the world there would be far fewer people willing to fight for the causes of others and the promise of a few more dollars.

I've never seen a movie that moved me so much but in such a sad way. It was perfect in its execution, but then again some lessons are better left unlearned.

...since a film has actually moved me quite like this. I had read about half of Dalton Trumbo's original novel before seeing the film. The book is sort of difficult to read, but the movie is one big revelation. It may be because Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for it and directed his own original brainchild that this film is so incredibly dense and gripping.

Much has been said about the plot and storyline, so I won't get on that here. The bottom line is, this movie is as original and authentic today as in 1971 when it was made (Vietnam war era, no less!), or even as in 1939 (at the eve of WW II!), the year the novel first appeared on bookshelves. A timeless classic if there ever was one, and a glowing testimony to the eternal insanity of war. Oftentimes subtle and subversive, its dialogs fully expose the madness of the whole concept of it. But it doesn't stop there, the film also examines the conflict between religion and war and the absurdity that ensues from justifying bloodshed through creed.

I could go on forever trying to explain here why this movie is such a masterpiece to me, but maybe it's enough to tell whoever will read this to go buy the DVD. Like I said, it's a timeless anti-war classic that's worth every cent.

This is the most disturbing movie I've ever seen. Beyond a doubt, the reason it is so obscure has nothing to do with its quality or relevance, but with the fact that it is too penetrating for the majority to handle. This is the cinematic equivalent of a punch in the face or a kick in the stomach. When I was about 12 or 13 I first saw the Metallica video "One", and I couldn't stop obsessing about it for days because it upset me so much. Anyone with an ounce of sensitivity will be knocked off their feet by this film. We watch a naive, well to do young man go to a war he doesn't understand in the slightest, and we also watch while he is brutally destroyed by a bomb. Trumbo has no pretensions to optimism or happy endings or anything of the kind; this healthy young man is turned into a pathetic, hideous hunk of flesh by a three second explosion that simply happened to occur, with no logic or reason to it. We hear his almost unendurable cries for his mother and his frantic desire to die as he realizes what he has been reduced to, a formless mass of flesh with no capacity for communication or real awareness left, and certainly no ability to enjoy anything. This is the first and only movie that has made me want to cry or leave the room in a hurry, and I've been a horror movie buff since age 11. This remorselessly tears right into the viewer not for the sake of tearing, but to prove a point. Just imagining yourself in this young man's position is enough to sink you into a fearful depression. Trumbo is outraged that we let this kind of thing occur at all any under circumstance, for whatever reason, and understandably shoves our faces into the real results of our passivity and complacency, shattering all our ridiculous fictions about the 'glory' or 'honor' of war. I think this should be required reading in high school, although extrasensitive people with depressive or morbid tendencies (like myself)should probably keep clear of it while still being strongly warned off the military or involvement in any kind of war. To me Dalton Trumbo epitomizes the genuinely anti establishment individual,not wanting to appear angry or discontented because it is stylish or in vogue, but being angry and discontented because unlike the rest of us he knows the true state of things and how deceptive our happy go lucky society really is. There are scenes in this movie that will be stamped on my psyche forever, and unpleasantly stamped at that. It is beyond my comprehension that any of the reviewers on this page could find this movie to be 'disappointing' or mediocre or whatever. I feel really bad for anyone who comes away from this movie without feeling anything. They should seriously cut themselves to see if they are robots or something. As you might have guessed, I am recommending it but at the same time warn anyone who watches that they will not be able to forget it or feel light hearted for a good chunk of time after viewing this film.