Johnny Got His Gun Reviews

I went to watch this because of Metallica, stayed for a well-made movie.

fantastic movie but him repeating "SOS Help Me" at the end literally gave me nightmares. the rest of it didn't bother me at all but him begging for help and knowing that none will come is kinda hard to watch. definitely the kind of movie you only watch once despite how good it is.

a traumatic watch butbit gets its point across marvellously

8.4/10

my review ended up being way longer than I meant for it to be so TLDR: I personally would suggest the book above the film, but I’d say both are successful in their own respective roles of showing the same disheartening and infathomable story with a different tone, and it was still a solid adaptation that even with some flaws, also greatly added to the original story



original review:
Having just finished the book an hour before I turned on the movie; I’d immediately say after watching the film, the book is far more impactful in portraying the despair and fear he was feeling in the face of the unimaginable odds he had been dealt, as well as many other things. They left out entire plot lines, those that had made reading the story much more immersive and had given more insight and context to who joe was before he lay helplessly on the hospital bed, allowing the nature of what he had been condemned to now live to truly sink into the reader along with the overwhelming understanding that he had just been a regular boy, doing any of the things a person might do. In the story, you also get to understand how drawn out and aggravating his attempts to grasp time and desperately regain a understanding of anything he could to feel some semblance of being connected to the rest of the world once again, it took upwards of weeks to months for him to finally catch it and that’s when the sun was supposed to hold importance because he changed his method from attempting to count seconds, hours and minutes as far as he possibly could go on for and decided that if he could just feel the sun instead he’d be back in sync of time, but it had been super rushed and ultimately nearly completely glossed over in the film despite its significance to his internal world, the sun scene was shown before any of his struggles with time and the task of catching up with time mentally didn’t get portrayed as much of a challenge for him to relearn like it had originally, and truthfully would’ve been in his state. The only criticism I have for the book is that there are some extremely dated views and language that I was kind’ve relieved to see largely removed from the film adaptation. I also don’t like how they portrayed the second nurse in the film, in the books she had misunderstood his attempts at communication as him trying to get her to satisfy him and he ended up being utterly disgusted and frustrated by it since all he had been wanting is a way to express himself, and in the film it was written off as a almost entirely normal interaction and I found that to be pretty wrong, given that he had no ability to consent to anything or resist. The dream sequences were also all completely mixed up and shortened, or all together removed or replaced by a new one. The dream with the train and christ was supposed to come right before, unknowingly or subconsciously knowingly, Christmas, right before the nurse spoke to him by drawing on his chest for the first time, so it genuinely felt more significant to the surrounding events when you read it but in the movie it was just kind’ve randomly thrown in and I could see it being pretty confusing. I could go on and on about the little and more crucial things that got left out but I also understand that it deserves some level of forgiveness due to its age and overall resources they had available at the time to create a film like this story, but I just wish they had left in more than they had. I did really enjoy being able to see and learn about what the doctors and nurses had been doing, saying or thinking because in the entire book you never once get to know anything from their perspective, which I do think adds to the immersion because you’re just as disconnected from understanding more about his environment as he is, and you know no more than him, but it still is interesting to see the same story from the eyes of the people who would be taking care of him, as well as what he is perceiving.

horrifying

a movie that makes you feel sick at the thought

Holy shit… blew my mind