Failed Catch

Watched Catch-22 recently and found it disappointing despite the foundations of a great story and a gifted cast of characters. Sadly the movie feels like a two dimensional caricature of the book which I had read in my college days. The memorable lines from Heller's book are served up as zingers and yet for someone who comes to the movie without having read the book, it would appear facile and comical. They would fail to get the point of it. Satire and dark comedy about war has been done to death - this is yet another one of those. 

For those of us who loved the book and came to the movie with great expectations, we would struggle to explain to the other person why Catch-22 is so special and why it is not all about Yossarian trapped in the eponymous catch but a story of the human condition, the various traps and catches that make up the sum total of our lives. Like Yossarian, we too are afraid of death and don't want to needlessly put ourselves in it's path. As we try to escape it we inevitably run into our personal version of Catch-22. That was the narrative arc of the Heller novel - arguably a very difficult thing to capture in a movie. Sadly it failed to come even close. I found myself defending the greatness of the novel and minimizing the flaws of the movie to those in the family who had never read the novel.