The most obvious change Davies and Michôd made was to take apart Heller’s collagelike text and refashion it as a chronological narrative, beginning (after a very brief flash-forward opening) with flight training in California and then moving to the Army Air Forces base on the Italian island Pianosa, where selected incidents from the book are forced into a sequence. Most of the cast, though - including Christopher Abbott as Yossarian and top-notch actors like Kyle Chandler (Colonel Cathcart) and Hugh Laurie (Major de Coverley) - can’t overcome the dullness of the screenplay, with its very un-Hellerian tendency to moralize. Clooney is fun to watch as the bullheaded Scheisskopf, and a few other performers manage to make an impression, like Daniel David Stewart as the uber-capitalist mess sergeant Milo Minderbinder and Graham Patrick Martin as the resourceful pilot Orr. The direction is straightforward and understated Grant Heslov (who also appears as Doc Daneeka) took on the bum assignment of directing Yossarian’s nighttime odyssey through the streets of Rome, and he did a better job of restraining his inner Fellini than Nichols did. Adapting a classic treatment of the irrationality of the military mind, they work assiduously to ensure that everything makes sense. The peculiar achievement of the writers, Luke Davies and David Michôd, and of George Clooney - who directed two of six episodes, is an executive producer and stars as the parade-obsessed officer Scheisskopf - is to take a daring, brilliantly observed synthesis of farce and outrage and turn it into a conventional, mostly laugh-free war story whose dominant notes are nostalgia, sentimentality and a resigned chagrin. Like Heller’s protagonist John Yossarian when faced with the insanity of war, they respond to the crazy ambition of Heller’s novel by choosing not to engage. The makers of the new Hulu mini-series “Catch-22,” which began streaming on Friday, take a different approach. Mike Nichols took the challenge head-on, and while his epic 1970 film version fell short of the target, it was a brave effort. Adapting it for the screen is not for the fainthearted. Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel toys with time, hopscotches among a huge cast of vividly defined characters and oscillates like an excited particle between Marx Brothers-level comedy and airborne battle scenes worthy of Hemingway. An attack on “Catch-22” is the kind of ultrahazardous mission for which no combat bonus could suffice.
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