.jeri.

Well, I'm probably going to have to revisit this movie at another, less sleepy time, but I'll still write a light review.

Slaughterhouse Five is adapted from a Vonnegut novel (I've never read anything of his) and features a man who has become unstuck in time. He keeps moving forward and backward in time. I'm not quite sure how that works - did he grow to a certain age as a normal person before this started happening to him? Or, throughout his entire life, does he just mentally check out and his consciousness just moves to his future self? In his older years, the man, Billy, has been picked up by aliens and placed in an oxygen-filled facility with an Earth woman for observational purposes. Occasionally, when he joins her, she'll ask him if he just drifted off to some other time.

In another time, we see Billy as he gets married to a bit of a shrew. She's not evil so much as annoying. Yet another time period is Billy's experience as a captured soldier in WWII who was in Dresden at the time of the firebombing. The film jumps about quite a bit between Billy's lives, and I struggled a bit because the segments were all so different from each other, feeling uncertain of how I was supposed to receive the movie. Sometimes it's comedic, sometimes it seems to want to emphasize more serious tones. But as a whole, it didn't completely come together for me.

The editing is another issue for me. What may well have worked in the book seems a little bit spastic in the movie. The jumping between time periods wasn't the problem so much as how it was accomplished. Too many quick cuts are made, and it's a little heavy-handed.

There were some great moments in the movie, but to be honest, I was so tired when I watched it that I didn't process much very well. It's one I'll be interested in watching again, definitely... but probably not for a while.