LET’S GET PHYSICAL: JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971) ****

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on April 30th, 2010)

Joe (Timothy Bottoms) is a soldier who goes over to France to fight in WWI.  One day, he gets blown up by a mortar and wakes up in a military hospital.  Slowly, he begins to realize that he’s lost his arms, legs, eyes, nose, mouth, and ears in the explosion.  He’s basically just a living torso lying on a bed.  The doctors and nurses think he’s a vegetable, and keep him alive; changing his feeding tubes and bedpans regularly.  Since Joe is deaf and missing his mouth; he can’t communicate with the nurses and doctors who are constantly poking and prodding him.  Joe slips in and out of consciousness and has flashbacks of his father (Jason Robards) telling him the importance of serving in the military.  He also starts having hallucinations where he meets Jesus (Donald Sutherland), who unfortunately isn’t very helpful.  One of his nurses (Diane Varsi) takes pity on poor Joe and tries to talk to him by writing letters on his chest with her fingers.  Eventually, Joe finds a way to communicate back to her; but will the army listen to what he has to say?

 

You may remember Johnny Got His Gun from seeing clips of it in the Metallica video, “One”.  I’ll admit; watching it in bits and pieces in the video was pretty creepy.  That’s nothing compared to the movie itself.  It’s one of the darkest, bleakest, most depressing movies I have ever seen in my entire life.  It also happens to be brutally efficient, haunting, and unforgettable.  I’ll tell you one thing, I watched it late last night and a bed was the last thing I wanted to get into after seeing this movie.

 

Johnny Got His Gun has been called an anti-war movie.  It isn’t really.  It’s more of an emotional horror movie.  It sure freaked me out.  Particularly chilling was the scene of Jesus driving a train full of dead soldiers, Joe’s girlfriend calling his name in a hallucination while fading away, and of course, the end where Johnny continually calls out “SOS… Help me…” to an empty room.  And just wait until the hungry rat jumps on what’s left of Johnny’s face.  In addition, this movie also happens to feature the least sexy handjob in the history of motion pictures.

 

Seeing Johnny wearing a mask and flopping around on a bed for two hours while his inner monologue screams for help isn’t exactly what I call “entertaining”, but it sure is compelling.  If you only know this movie from seeing it in the Metallica video; you really owe it to yourself to check this out.  It’s definitely powerful stuff.