'Catch-22' May Not Be By The Book, But It Understands Brutality
Hulu's adaptation of Catch-22 may not be Catch-22 as you know it, but it stands as an often-effective anti-war drama.
If Hulu had announced an original dramatic miniseries that follows a World War II soldier awakening to the horrors of war, executive produced and partly directed (two episodes out of six) by George Clooney, and if the result had been Catch-22, it would have seemed largely successful. But the series, available in full today, is of course an adaptation of Joseph Heller's much-chewed-over 1961 novel, a book very unusual in both its tone and its structure. And as an adaptation, it struggles to meet the inevitable expectations.
Some of the basics are retained from the book: Christopher Abbott plays the bombardier Yossarian, who would like to stop flying missions and go home. But every time he approaches the number of missions the
