Theo Robertson This is one of these films you never forget . To coin a cliché once seen and never forgotten and has become well known over the years via the Metallica video promo for one . It's a heavy handed statement on war that once a peace deal is signed two things always remain and that is the dead stay dead and the injured remain injured . The loved ones of the dead are emotional victims of war while the injured are physical victims of the war . Be as cynical and as scathing as you want but Dalton Trumbo knows exactly what he's doing and he succeeds in his magnificent manipulation of the audience . Timothy Bottom was snubbed by the award ceremonies for his Oscar worthy performance which is meant to reduce the audience to tears and the film itself was mainly ignored by the prestigious awards for obviously being too subversive , politics always has a part to play in who wins what . There is an irony when film awards are handed out . At least every soldier who won a medal deserved it . Film awards are entirely different But after seeing JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN ask yourself a question . What is it about Joe Bonham that elicits such sincere grief for him ? Is it because he was a young man from a democratic society ? Put it like this - if he wasn't a 20 year old kid from early 20th Century America fighting in the Great War , say for example he was a Taliban theocrat from Afghanistan or Pakistan who was guilty of raping children and throwing acid in the face of women and had his arms , legs and face blown off by a NATO shell would the audience feel the same level of sympathy ? Of course not and rightly so . Watch this film and take something from it but never forget what Hemmingway said that there's some things worse than war and they all end in defeat

jzappa Vietnam determinedly enlightens Dalton Trumbo's repossession of old ground in the era of MASH and Catch-22. Trumbo's Johnny is, yes indeed, a guy named Joe, once a baker supporting his family, smitten with gentle Teresa Wright or Greer Garson-style girl, who joins the army because, why, "it's the sort of thing a fella oughta do, when his country is in trouble." All these familial figures are in essence Norman Rockwell collectibles. What a contrast when, in the trenches, he's sent on a round to hide a carcass that affronts a colonel's sense of smell. A shell lands near him. This is his last memory before he, regrettably, awoke, in a hospital.The army is satisfied he has no cognizant mind. They resolve to keep him breathing only to study him. But he's cognizant all right, and little by little he becomes so of the horror of his wounds. He's literally captive within his mind, for a desperate eternity to anyone with no available concept of time, until he discovers a way of communicating with a compassionate nurse. Trumbo avails himself of a brilliant fast-cutting sequence, in a sense the sort one frequently sees in edgy late '60s and early '70s movies, but a particularly incisive and acute portrayal of mental disorientation, Bottoms struggling to organize his new life's routine without the aid of any physical outlet, no anchor for his thoughts, struggling to file them with constant bewildering disturbances and loss of bearings. Even telling day from night is a mystery for him to solve.The upsetting premise benefits from Paths of Glory, La Jetée and the story of Helen Keller, but in no way does he tell his story in anything but the most inimitable way. Never before or since this film have we seen anything much like it. Because of Trumbo's determination to render the most exacting possible depiction of Bottoms' unique perception, there is even a transitional effect unique to this film, a fade to yellow when he feels the sun for the first time since his injuries. This truly unique work also unearths probably the most inventive use of voice-over I might've ever heard: He describes people we see as vibrations. When two nurses enter, he claims that now there are two vibrations. In a clever smidgen of much-needed levity, one nurse is fat, and he supposes it's a man.A story that authentically imparts the loneliest possible consciousness, one where the subject can't even be sure whether or not he's alive, Trumbo draws on flashbacks and flights of a deserted, despairing imagination to make Joe alive for us, as he subsists in a living death. Evincing what could perhaps be argued as a level of bitterness in respect to the filming of Trumbo's human war tales in the past, or simply a yearning for the naivete of the old days, some memories and fantasies recreate the 1940s melodrama use of music, soft lens, close-ups and prosy dialogue. Then we find some of the brutal realities of real-life scenes are muted by some of that classic technique after awhile as well. The most pleasant flashback is the first, when Joe and his girl kiss in her living room and are cut short by her father, who sends them to her room, where there's a love scene of such softness and splendor that its resonance ring through the whole film. Representing Trumbo's own awe at his character is Donald Sutherland's Jesus, who counsels Joe in a celestial milieu more akin to how Trumbo might've truly wanted to portray the same fantasy in A Guy Named Joe over thirty years before.Christ actually doesn't have much to put forward. He has no solutions because there are none. Indeed, the film closes with no political answers and without, as a matter of fact, even a political outlook. It purely presents a set of circumstances. Here was a loyal young American who went off and was hideously injured for no grand cause, and whose alert mind lives on as a staggering condemnation of powers that be who sent all the young men away to do this to one another.

ZombieSteak .com More often then not I am unimpressed by older horror movies that other people rave about unless they scared the crap out of me when I was a child. This movie was an exception. I watched this for the first time and spent the majority of it tense with chills running down my spine.What could be worse then death? Watch this movie and you will see. Imagine you wake up with no arms, legs, you cant see or hear and your face is gone leaving a gaping hole where it used to be. This movie takes you're through that journey through the narration of the young man placed in this horrible position.This movie takes you on an emotional journey and sucks you into the story immediately. I just cant believe I never saw this earlier, but I am glad I didn't miss it.Zombiesteak.com - Discover a new world of horror films, designed just for you.

flaglady15 Johnny is a victim of war. Sans almost everything with which we communicate with the world outside our bodies, his only sanctuary is his memories. And a nurse who somehow manages to sense that he is more than a living corpse. I watched this film in 1980 and can still remember about 30% of it! It still gives me the shudders but, being a nurse, also made me think deeply about patients in so-called "vegetative states". Science is slowly discovering that the (then) fictional ideas in this film aren't so far away from fact.And I only watched it because it was one of David Soul's early film appearances (he only pops up for about 3 mins!).