BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Humaira Grant It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

dougdoepke It's a difficult movie to get a conventional handle on. Essentially, we're made to feel what Joe feels (note the universal "GI Joe" sort of name), as he lies trapped in his own bare consciousness inside a WWI field hospital. It's not death exactly, but cut off from the outside world by drastic combat wounds, he can experience only his own inner thoughts. So it's about as close to death as a bare level of consciousness can reach. Slowly he struggles to interpret the bare vibrations from outside that he senses. Trouble is he often has little control over his thoughts, as dreams, wishes, and recollections, all erupt beyond his control. Thus the movie narrative itself is non-linear for the most part, rendering his inner experience into a difficult series of fragments.Fortunately, the movie also follows the objective world of the hospital, where doctors and nurses tend to him. Contrasting this linear outer world with his fragmented inner world is one of the movie's strengths, since we are made to feel the terrible rupture that has occurred as a consequence of war.By filming his inner world in color, while contrasting that with the outer world of b&w, things are made somewhat easier to parse for viewers. Clearly, the movie's overall intent is to debunk the romanticism that's often made of blind patriotism and war service. Joe's pre-war life is normal and promising. However, he buys into the patriotic appeals of WWI (a dubious war, at best), resulting in what amounts to a future of living death. Wisely, the screenplay uses his tragic state as its anti-war message rather than preachy dialog, though documentary footage of such war-promoters a T. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson do appear.Acting isn't so important in the movie's scheme. It's Bottoms's boyish appearance that conveys his role. Then too, most of his screen time is spent under a therapeutic face mask in bed. It's really Jason Robards as Joe's dad who gets a chance to show his acting chops which he does. Good to see that fine veteran of film noir Charles McGraw as the churlish Mike. Meanwhile, the girls, Varsi and Fields, have little more to do than be appealingly nurturing. It's pretty clear that man-woman relationships are presented as worthy opposites to war-making. In that sense, this 1971 production echoes norms of the rebellious 60's.I haven't read Trumbo's book, so I don't know how well they compare. But given his roles as the movie's writer and director, the result can't be considered a travesty, a not infrequent claim by authors divorced from the movie versions. All in all, I can see why many folks would be put off with the narrative, difficult and disturbing as it is, especially by the quietly shattering conclusion. But for others, the movie's a bold attempt to deal with a highly unusual aspect of war, and in a very memorable way.

bkoganbing If you are at all squeamish than please avoid seeing Johnny Got His Gun. Not there is anything to see that is particularly, but Timothy Bottoms character in and of himself is one frightening example of what can come out of war and should it.The unkindest cut of all is minutes before the armistice was declared in operation and the guns ceased, Timothy Bottoms receives a blast from a mortar shell. Everything that makes one relate to what's around is now gone from him, four limbs, the windows to the senses all gone. But more of his brain is intact than the doctors realize and the film is narrated by Bottoms trying to communicate and also his memories of much better times before the Great War.Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten had been back working for over a decade now from the blacklist, but here he was not writing a script but also was the director filming his own novel. No doubt certain people were looking for a hidden subversive message. But the only message that Johnny Got His Gun delivers is war is very bad thing and does terrible things to some human bodies.Of course the title is a past tense of that opening verse of George M. Cohan's period flag waver Over There. So many young men from so many countries marched to war with those songs thinking war was some kind of honor thing. Honor if there ever was any in war was lost in that conflict where automatic weapons, poison gas, and the tank came to the fore. Kids with 19th century ideals like Bottoms as we see his reminiscences came up against something that flag waving nostrums didn't take into account.Bottoms is brilliant in the film that first gave him stardom and the rest of the cast performs well. Credit goes to Dalton Trumbo for a necessary, but harrowing piece of cinema.

sddavis63 There is absolutely nothing flashy about this movie.It stands unpretentiously as a disturbingly simple film depicting the horrors of war to a generation fed up with Vietnam (much in the same way MASH did, except that MASH used the Korean War to stand in for Vietnam, while this uses World War I.) "Johnny Got His Gun" tells us the story of Joe Bonham, a young American soldier horribly wounded, so that he has no arms, no leg, and no face. He is a head and a torso. The doctors assume that because of his injuries he has no consciousness, no sense of feeling, and so they set out to keep him alive as long as possible - basically to see how long they can do it. Joe, though, is frighteningly conscious, aware of everything happening to him and around him. The military comes across as heartless and uncaring. The nursing staff comes off as slightly more compassionate toward this poor unfortunate. The scenes in the hospital are narrated by Timothy Bottoms (who plays Joe) as he relates all that he's experiencing. A significant part of the movie is also told by way of flashback, as we explore where Joe came from and what his life had been like and what his dreams are. Donald Sutherland appears in these "dream" sequences as Christ in a series of conversations Joe has about he nature of reality.This isn't a squeamish film. We hear about Joe's injuries but we don't see them. There are a lot of the familiar points made about war - I certainly recognized a point made most recently by Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 911 about the old men who won't be asked to fight sending off the young men to fight and die. Joe himself is clearly representative (in an admittedly extreme way) of the millions of young men whose lives are devastated by war and who will never be the same again, even if they survive. The story doesn't tell us Joe's ultimate fate. He figures out a way to communicate by morse code by shaking his head, but what becomes of him is left as an open question.This is apparently a low budget film, and it's in no way fancy. That's appropriate, because the subject matter doesn't need any glorification. Its power may actually be in its very simplicity.

random_avenger On the last day of Word War I, a soldier named Joe (Timothy Bottoms) is hit by an artillery shell that doesn't kill him but destroys all of his limbs, face, vision, hearing and ability to speak. He wakes up in a hospital where he can feel people's presence in the room by the vibrations they make on the floor but cannot communicate with them in any way, causing him extreme anxiety. All he has left is his imagination which he uses to revisit his sometimes surreal memories of his childhood and youth, remembering especially his father (Jason Robards), girlfriend (Kathy Fields) and deceased army buddies. He also has conversations with Jesus himself (Donald Sutherland), but not even He seems to know how to help.The contrast between reality and Joe's dreams is marked by switches from black & white to colour. In the hospital room we can hear Joe's desperate voice trying to make contact with the doctors and nurses who either don't pay attention or just can't understand him. Only one of the nurses (Diane Varsi) truly wants to see him as a human being anymore. It's very easy to feel his pain and hearing him begging the doctors via Morse code to either make him a public demonstration of the horrors of war or just kill him is one of the most effective anti-war scenes ever. The very last scene should haunt the audience for a long time after the film has ended.Even though a bedridden shadow of a man sounds like an unlikely subject for a film, Johnny Got His Gun succeeds excellently. The anti-war message is heavy, but what other kind of message can you have about a world war? The heart-breaking story, diverse visual style, steady direction and strong performances by Bottoms, Robards and Varsi make the film a powerful work of art. It is one of the best war films I've seen and I'll recommend it to anyone looking for an effective cinematic experience in any genre.