REVIEW - CATCH-22 (HULU SERIES)

I just finished watching Hulu's recent adaptation of the Joseph Heller novel, Catch-22. I have never read the book and am only familiar with the 1970 film adaptation. Now, from what I've gathered after checking out a few reviews online after finishing the mini-series, I think your enjoyment of this is going to be heavily dependent on what you're familiar with. Fans of the book seem pretty universally harsh on both the film and this 2019 mini-series. However, without that background, I'm only comparing this to the film, which I saw on several occasions in my youth. Despite the critics, I'll also note that on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, this series still gets very high average scores all round.

I've always liked the film and found that this six part TV adaptation worked even better for me in terms of fleshing out the story. If you're not too familiar with it, this is NOT a story about WWII, even though that is the setting. What it's really about is the incompetence of bureaucracies and the sociopathy of capitalistic systems, using the war as an allegorical device to explore these themes. It's a straddling of satire and trauma illustrating how these systems create irreconcilable personal conflicts when social structures are engineered such that expectations are untenable, where the goalposts of success are constantly being pushed further away, just out of reach. It shows how power and authority often end up in the hands of those least capable of coping with them, engendering sadism and cruelty as tools to protect those in authority from being exposed for the frauds that they are. It's a story which, while originally published in 1961, deals with themes that are strikingly relevant to the present day.

The issues, if you have any, may come with the degree to which the series is faithful to the book. Critics who are fans of the book complain that its message has been diluted or "dumbed down" for mainstream entertainment. That may well be true, but from my own subjective standpoint and judging it solely on how engaging I found it, I'd say it's rather an excellent series.

To begin with, the overall production values are top notch. It looks authentic and period accurate. The cinematography looks great and the action scenes are rendered very believably while avoiding gratuitous flamboyance and gore. The cast all worked very well for me and delivered what I found to be poignant and appropriately humorous characterizations, because this is driven by satire, wicked at its best.

Now, I may very well one day read the book and then look back on these interpretations as faint and feeble, but on their own, judged on their own merits, they still have something valid to say. Having the time delve into it over the course of six 45 minute episodes gives it a lot of room to breath and I found myself very much engrossed in the story and moved by both its highs and lows.