Altman's groundbreaking style of cinema is ideal for a landscape as fractured and as surreal as the battlefield. His use of overlapping dialogue - basically novel to audiences in 1970 - combined with sharp satire coming off of the Summer of '69 makes the film jump off the screen for me. We flow from Hawkeye and Duke to Frank and Father Mulcahy with ease. And while others will go on to praise TV's version, I much prefer commander Blake to Potter for actually saying something: war in and of itself is not funny. We laugh to get through war. And the institution of the military, especially in Korea and Vietnam, was not there to help soldiers deal with the horror of it all, or to avoid passing judgment on sexual orientation. I see echoes of Altman's shift in storytelling via another 1970 work: Stephen Sondheim's Company. Equally chaotic, equally insightful, and also subversive, both in subject matter and in the format itself. Company completely eschews the Happily Ever After ending that was all but mandated for in stage musicals. A nice companion piece to this film, if you have the time and inclination to seek it out. If you're planning to see this for the first time, try to situate yourself in the USA that existed in 1970, not in the 21st century - a USA that reeled in horror and only narrowly avoided giving the film an "X" rating because this film had the audacity to have the word "fuck" in it. Different times, indeed.