My girlfriend and I recently decided to start watching the M*A*S*H TV show. For context, I’ve never seen the show, whereas my girlfriend watched a lot of the episodes when she was younger, but just never sat down and did a full watchthrough. Anyway, neither of us had seen the movie that preceded the show, so we figured we’d watch that before starting the show.

For those who may not know, the story of MASH centers around a military hospital that operates on soldiers who are injured in the war. While the movie came before the show, the movie is actually based on a book, so that’s where the idea came from. Anyway, though, the story is all about how the people in this military camp manage to keep their sanity during times of war and hardship by getting into all sorts of trouble.

I’ll be honest…I HATED this movie. The whole time I was watching it, I kept thinking to myself “I really hope the show is better than this, because I can’t fathom watching 11 seasons of THIS.” (Side note: Since seeing the movie, I’ve already watched the first eight episodes of the show, and I’m happy to say that it is MUCH better than the movie.) I couldn’t even imagine how this franchise had gained such a large following, because I thought everything I was seeing throughout the movie was horrendous.

The movie has a slew of problems, so I’ll try to just sum it up easily. I think the biggest problem is its characters. Almost all of them are extremely unlikeable here. There were points where the characters would be pulling a prank on someone, and as the audience we’re supposed to laugh along with them. But I just thought that it was all incredibly mean-spirited, and I thought that the characters were terrible people for acting the way they were. The other big problem with the characters is that they’re not very distinctive from each other. Aside from the main character of Hawkeye, I had no idea who was supposed to be who in the movie. One of the reasons for this is one of the weirdest things I’ve experienced in a movie. In so many of the scenes here, we get a bunch of characters in one shot, who all look and sound the same, that are mumbling their lines and talking over one another. It was so jarring, and I was baffled at the choice to allow this to happen. I had no idea what was going on most of the time because it was all just a mumbled, jumbled mess.

The other big problem I had is that the movie felt like it really had no point. The movie basically feels like a long (and trust me, it feels long) series of unconnected skits. There are just so many random scenes going on, with no real cohesive narrative to tie them all together. The flip side of this is that it gave me hope that I’d like the TV series, because it was evident that this sort of premise would work much better in a half-hour episodic format than it would in a 2 hour long movie. I never really felt drawn into the story because nothing was ever happening that was important.

Considering how highly regarded this movie is (you can see positive scores for it on Rotten Tomatoes, IMDB, etc.), I was really surprised with how much I disliked this movie. It makes no sense to me why this movie is loved by anyone, because it’s just a complete mess. It’s two hours of a bunch of terrible people getting into seemingly unrelated antics, all while mumbling over each other in an incoherent way. I actually rank this as one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Check out the TV show, but don’t even bother watching the movie.

1/5