One Paragraph Movie Review: M*A*S*H

Three hundred and thirty-ninth film: M*A*S*H, the 1970 movie that inspired the best television show ever made ever. I’ll never know what it’s like to have seen the movie before the series, and that coupled with how I feel about anything containing Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland means I am incapable of being objective. But I honestly can’t tell what this movie is supposed to be. One part military sit-com, one part character piece, and unexpectedly one fifth inter-unit football game, there’s no real plot or story arc, just — like the series — a bunch of draftees getting up to hijinks between elbow-deep sessions of grisly war zone surgery. There’s some values that are uncomfortably 1970s, some recognisable character names, and an extremely familiar set, but it’s impossible to watch this as anything but a long pilot episode before everything got tight and snappy. In this specific case I’ll take Alda over Altman. Two and a half Hot Lips nickname origins out of five.