George Roy Hill's Movie Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughter-House Five"

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George Roy Hill's movie adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughter-house Five is a fairly accurate version that stays relatively close to Vonnegut's own vision. Throughout Vonnegut novel Billy Pilgrim, a WWII soldier who was captured by the Germans and held captive as an American POW (prisoner of war), demonstrates several extreme compulsive tendencies due to the horrific events he witnessed as an American POW victim. After reading of Billy’s experiences, I did not have faith in the movies ability to accurately present Vonnegut's own personal feelings. On the contrary, after seeing George Hill's movie adaptation of Slaughter-house Five, I felt that the he did an extremely nice job in keeping with what Vonnegut had intended to be seen and felt in his novel.

Surprisingly I was exceptionally impressed in the way Hill's movie succeeded in depicting the concept of the novel which I thought would be almost impossible to translate on to a movie screen. I found it difficult to envision how Hill would be able to display abstract topics such as "being unstuck in time" (Vonnegut) on the big screen. However, I was relatively impressed by the way Billy was able to travel around seamlessly to different points in his life just as he did in Kurt Vonnegut's novel. At times throughout Slaughter-house Five I found it rather challenging to follow Billy through all his time traveling. I was happily surprised that this was not the case for Hill's movie adaptation; for I had imagined that it would be much more difficult to follow in the movie as it was in the book.

I feel that Hill was able to flawlessly make the transition between Billy’s time traveling events more easy to follow by incorporating an aspect that Vonnegut did not use in his...

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...ark for me.

For the most part Hill’s adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughter-house Five is an authentic modified version that stays relatively close to Vonnegut's own vision. Both, the movie and book, portray Billy’s past as a young man stuck in war, with his future being in a zoo on a planet for aliens as well as a hapless middle-aged optometrist in his present time. I enjoyed the book very much but was a bit uncertain of how it was going to translate on to the movie screen. However, thanks to Hill’s efforts, he was able to stay pretty loyal to the novels outline and I enjoyed watching Billy just as much as I did reading about him.

Works Cited

Slaughterhouse Five. Dir. George Roy Hill. Perf. Michael Sacks and Kevin Conway. Universal Studios, 1972. Netflix.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. New York, NY: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1994. Print.

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