A young American soldier, rendered in pseudocoma from an artillery shell from WWI, recalls his life leading up to that point.
Ratings
Curator score: 5.7/10
IMDb: 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 67%
Metacritic: 71
TMDB: 7.5/10
Director
Dalton Trumbo
Production
World Entertainment
Cast
Timothy Bottoms, Kathy Fields, Marsha Hunt, Jason Robards, Donald Sutherland, Charles McGraw, Sandy Brown Wyeth, Don 'Red' Barry, Peter Brocco, Kendell Clarke, Eric Christmas, Eduard Franz, Craig Bovia, Judy Howard Chaikin, Dalton Trumbo, Diane Varsi, David Soul, Anthony Geary, Maurice Dallimore, Robert Easton
Where to watch
Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Curator Review
Verdict
A harrowing anti-war nightmare that turns battlefield injury into existential horror. Its formal audacity and bleak emotional force make it a major, unforgettable watch for viewers who can handle extreme distress and slow-burn psychological collapse.
Best for
anti-war cinema fans
viewers who like experimental or surreal drama
people interested in body-horror-adjacent psychological films
fans of bleak 1970s cinema
viewers drawn to political allegory and moral outrage
Skip if
you want a conventional war movie
you are sensitive to graphic medical/body trauma
you prefer clear, linear storytelling
you want uplifting or cathartic endings
you dislike surreal, stagey, or highly theatrical filmmaking
Overview
Johnny Got His Gun is less a war film than a punishment chamber built out of memory, sensation, and silence. Dalton Trumbo turns a soldier’s catastrophic injury into an assault on the viewer, using fractured flashbacks and nightmare logic to make the body itself feel like a prison.
Worth noting
What lingers most is the film’s moral fury. It is not interested in battlefield heroics or tactical detail; it is interested in what war does to a human being after the headlines are gone. That makes it brutal, but also unusually precise in its anti-war argument.
Bottom line
The film can feel mannered and extreme, even bizarre, yet that strangeness is part of its power. It is a difficult, unforgettable work that earns its reputation through sheer intensity and commitment to its nightmare premise.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Adi Mocanu (5★) · 1482 likes
"Darkness
Imprisoning meAll I seeAbsolute horrorI cannot liveI cannot dieI am my only self"
This movie gave me nightmares, but it is one of the greatest works of cinema I have ever watched!
theriverjordan (4.5★) · 257 likes
“Johnny Got His Gun” is a delirious fever dream spanning not just one night, but almost a half a century of American history.
Based Dalton Trumbo’s iconic 1939 novel, “Johnny Got His Gun” sees the screenwriter/author returning to his own material decades later; this time to direct its cinematic adaption. Only the work’s original author could so radically distort the book’s original tone, while keeping its core message entirely intact.
“Johnny,” disturbingly incorporeal in its original text’s form, becomes nightmarishly… more
Rafael "Mister Movie" Jovine (3★) · 245 likes
This is a weird ass movie with a weird ass legacy, a weird ass tone and some weird ass performances.
Basically you have a movie directed by a then "communist pariah" Dalton Trumbo (Spartacus, Exodus) with an uncredited contribution by Luis Bunuel. This anti-war script resembles a cross between The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, Seconds, a Terry Gilliam film, and The Ninth Configuration. Our protagonist's performance is not so terrible as it is "bizarre," mostly due to the dialogue.… more
Kev (5★) · 200 likes
Fuck any horror film you’ve ever seen, this is the must brutal of all, and frankly one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen.
[Best of the 1970’s]
Sin ✊🏿 (4.5★) · 180 likes
Consciousness as a prison.
Distinguishing between reality and fantasy rendered nigh impossible. Hostage to eternal darkness and nightmares. Existence is perpetual stasis damnation, and life isn't worth living if it can't be actively lived.
You can't move. You can't see. You can't speak. You can't touch. You can't hear beyond sensing movement vibrations. You're limbless. Loss of mobility. Loss of meaning. Where you are is a mystery. When you are is indecipherable. Nobody can save you, not even whichever of… more
1980 · Drama, Thriller, Comedy · 1h 58m · R · Curator 1.5/10 (10.2K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, Night Flight Plus, Midnight Pulp, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A strange, philosophical companion piece about madness, faith, and the scars of war.