A mess that barely qualifies as a movie

Rating: 3/10 (7 July 2020)

My biggest struggle with Robert Altman movies in the past is that he is an avid fan of improv, and using the screenplay as a general outline instead of a script. You can certainly get a sense of that in M*A*S*H as the characters freely chit-chat about things in a way that feels awkward and unnatural. Most of the humor is mumbled and treated like throw-away jokes, which can work in small quantities but it falls flat when there is no life behind any of the comedy. I tolerated a lot of this aimless jabbering because it came from a good cast of accomplished actors, although I couldn't help mentally imagining what it would sound like with the cast from the TV show who had more time to lock in these characters and flesh them out. Improv of this kind gets better the more you understand the person you are portraying.
Perhaps the bigger issue I had with this screenplay (or the way it was handled) was that it lacked a narrative of any kind. There's no plot progression, no character development, and no momentum to the film. It feels like a series of vignettes slapped together in a hasty fashion, to the point that you could shuffle the entire film around in any order and accomplish the same thing. While watching, I totally understood how someone saw M*A*S*H and thought it would translate into a good TV show, because the film itself feels very episodic. There's the one about Radar catching Frank Burns and Hot Lips making out and utterly embarrassed them, and then the episode about the guys going into another unit to work on a senator's son, or perhaps you'd enjoy the one where they have to play a big football game against another unit, and so much more! It's a series of short stories, not a plot.
Then there's the issue I had with the content of the comedy in M*A*S*H. It was horribly misogynistic in a way that doesn't just feel like a product of that time, but actually harmful. The things that this movie presents as hilarious jokes are the most extreme forms of sexual harassment imaginable. Yet when anyone suggests that these men be punished for their crimes it is dismissed and all is forgiven. I think we are meant to ignore or laugh off the misconduct because these men are seeing the horrors of war, and they will stop at nothing to lighten the mood. Yet we never see them confronted with the darkness of the Korean War. They are working on wounded men and have some patients die, but we don't see that impact them in any way. The surgery scenes are just like filler between the attempts at humor in this mess of a movie. Honestly, the film makes me afraid to revisit the TV show M*A*S*H, because I'm afraid it might have been this terrible and I never noticed.