Billy Pilgrim Meets Sean Connery

       For this comparison, I looked for a war movie that was reasonably recent, and not boring. I found what I was looking for in the 1990 film, the Hunt for Red October, starring Sean Connery as the Soviet submarine commander of their newest vessel, the Red October. Also featured is a very young Alec Baldwin, as a CIA analyst who gets in "too deep." The basic plot is that a USSR submarine is detected to have a new capacity that makes it silent and undetectable by sonar. They then enable this new technology. The Soviets put out an order to sink the Red October, as they have shared their plans to defect with them. The Soviets tell the Americans that they have threatened war in order to get them to sink the submarine. With his skills and obsession, Baldwin makes a guess that the commander (Connery) is trying to defect, not start a war. He then proceeds to save the day.
       The Baldwin character is not unlike Billy Pilgrim. He went into the navy at a young age, was severely wounded in a helicopter crash, but afterwards, returned to school. After this he was recommended to the CIA. However, this seems to be a glorified version of our friend Billy, who did all these things, but with lesser reward. After he returned from the bombing of Dresden, he enrolled in the Illium School of Optometry, less reputed than the CIA.
       In this movie, war is centered around strategy, and discovering who your true enemies are. In some of the final scenes, the winner is determined by who can most cleverly manipulate the submarine. By its title and technological innovation, we can see that the Red October is the clear winner at the end of the day. Torpedoes are avoided by millimeter, and require the sheer determination and skill of human beings to be eradicated. There characters are men. Even the young CIA analyst has an intelligence and an ability far beyond his years. Surprisingly, few men die, and none die by chance. In this movie, it seems that every effect is a direct result of a cause, and that if you work hard enough, you can win any war.
       This is not the case in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. In the world of the protagonist, and I use that term loosely, because he's a sad one at best, events happen because this is how that have always happened and always will happen. Nothing is your fault, and time moves around willy nilly, as explained by the Tralfamadorian philosophy. While in the Hunt for Red October, the soldiers are buff, intelligent adults, Billy Pilgrim is a poorly equipped, scared child. It seems that he can do nothing to escape his fate of being "unstuck in time." In contrast to the Hunt for Red October, many people die and are killed. It is not given nearly as much significance as even the brushed over murder of the second in command in the movie, but merely responded to with, "so it goes."
       The vastness in the interpretation of war can be seen just in these two examples of works that address it. While both feature young boys growing up in the throes of battle, they have very different outcomes. The Hunt for Red October explores the themes of strategy and manipulation, while Slaughterhouse 5 deals with fate and an incomprehensible, deterministic universe.