The Deer Hunter

Rating:
Summary: Deserves SOME credit......but...
Review: I am 32 years old and was just a kid when this movie was released. My whole life I have heard about how phenomonal this movie was supposed to be. I consider myself a bit of a movie buff and have seen many films regarding the Vietnam conflict and the resulting after effects. I would never by any means disrespect those who served in that ridiculous conflict, I have the utmost respect for our fighting men and women having served myself. But does this movie really deserve all the accolades it receives?

Yes it is a good film. Good, not tremendous drop everything and kneel at the cinema alter. This movie is seperated into 3 hours, each hour documenting a different period in the characters lives. By far the most powerful and redeeming portion of this film (for me anyway) was the 2nd hour which focuses on the characters while serving in Vietnam. I don't think anyone can deny the second hour of this fim is powerful and well worth the praise it receives. But this alone does not make it a fantastic film. I LOVE Christopher Walken. LOVE him. But did he really deserve an academy award for his performance in this film? I can think of 5 other movies off the top of my head that Walken should have received Oscars, or at least a nod for.

And did this film really deserve the best picture of 1978? I am asking this as a legitmate question. 1978 must have had some slim pickin's at the movies that year if these awards were rightly presented. Now I realize that possibly in '78 when this movie was released, it was worthy of everything it received. The conflict in Vietnam was just barely over and it probably touched a chord with many viewers. And many of us also have the benefit of many years of vietnam movies since then to compare this movie against. In my opinion no one can touch PLATOON for the raw emotion and power in that film. Hamburger hill is also a bit of an underated classic in that sense.

I recognize that The Deer Hunter is much more than a war movie. I realize it touches on the charcters lives before and after their experience in Vietnam. I realize the director was trying to get the audience to connect and bond with the characters and help us understand and relate to them so we could feel something for them. But my God was a 35 minute wedding/reception scene really needed to do this?! I NEVER fast forward a movie when I'm watching it..almost never anyway....and I found myself trying to fast forward this supposed American classic so I could get to the meat of the story..it was embarrassing. I feel this movie would have been infinetly better if it was cut down to 2 hours, maybe 2hrs and 15 min. I just felt what ultimately wrecked this long awaited movie experience for me ( I actually waited to watch it until I got my new TV I was so excited to see it) was its unneccesary length. Some people feel this length was needed to tell the story. I completely disagree.

Maybe I just dropped the ball on this one...I was really bummed after watching this movie because I had hyped myself for YEARS to see it...and who knows...maybe that's why I didn't think it was as great as everyone else. But I must admit, the performances by Walken and De Niro in the 2nd hour alone were amazing and brought this movie back out out of the depths of boredom for me.

Rating:
Summary: Real and Shocking but a very slow war/family drama
Review: The Deer Hunter is a very powerful movie and hard to describe without actually seeing it. During the late 1970s Hollywood put out a string of epics with a three hour + running time. The Deer Hunter was one of them. The Deer Hunter is not for everyone, although it does cater for all audiences. It has war /drama /romance /horror and mystery all rolled into one. Essentially the film is about friendship and how the Vietnam war ruined the lives of everyday people. But Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now have all told us this type of story before. What makes the Deer Hunter any different?

The Deer Hunter works on the basis of realism. There is no Hollywood type plot here and it certainly has art house appeal even though it boasts an A-list cast. The story is sometimes linear and then sometimes not. The characters are not entirely fleshed out fully, their backgrounds a mystery and their psychological profiles left uncertain but there are connections and this is all relative to the storyline which is essentially about friendship, lovers and coping with the aftermath of war. It is often very shocking in parts, especially the infamous "Russian roulette" sequences which is played out in a hyper-realistic manner.

Robert De Niro plays Michael Vronsky, a sort of quiet hard man who only speaks when he feels he has something to say and who has a soft spot for a girl called Linda, played by Meryl Streep. Linda agrees to marry Nick played by Christopher Walken, Michaels best friend, during a wedding between Steven played by John Savage, and his wife Angela played by Rutanya Alda. All of these three men are also celebrating enlisting for the army so that they can fight in the Vietnam war. Three of their best friends - Axel, Stanley and John are not going and will remain in the town of Clairton, Pennsylvania awaiting the return of the war heroes. All of the friends have a few things in common. They work in a steel factory, go deer hunting and like to drink beer together. The filmmakers build up an intimate relationship between the characters and again, realism, is the key to how the story is presented. There are lots of shots with nothing much going on and sequences that are simply not relevant to the plot, but all of it is used in a way to make the story much more believable.

It is suffice to say the war wrecks havoc on everybody and friendships suffer. The good times are mostly lost and the war veterans are trying to come to terms with themselves. Michael is still trying to act the hard man, trying to fix things, make everybody better - but there is very little he can do about it no matter how hard he tries. He has gone through so much that he does not want to see it all in vain, but he can not do anything and this frustrates him. Nick has gone insane is virtually replaying his role as a prisoner of war for all the world to see... and bet on. Steven is a cripple and his wife has put him in a institution. Linda is confused and just wants a man to settle down with her. It is all very sad and played with absolute authenticity.

The Deer Hunter is not a film that you are supposed to enjoy. It is more of an experience and you will have to be in the right frame of mind to sit through it without putting your finger on the fast-forward button. If you like it, like I and many others do, then you will enjoy repeat viewings. There is certainly something new every time you see it. For those of you that do not like slow moving dramas then avoid.... but you do not know what you are missing.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant movie - for the time, the place, and the people
Review:

Post-modern criticism teaches that all language and judgement is culturally relative. This film exemplifies that. It spoke to a particular people at a particular time and place. It won't make much sense to today's Iraq War generation.

The Deer Hunter was set near the end of the Viet Nam war when popular dissent against the war was starting to take hold in Main Street, USA. This movie is not about evil Vietnamese or American heroes. It's not about patriotism. None of the themes that sway today's generation made sense then.

This movie is about people - American teenage boys - and their breaking points. These youung men were born into a place with no opportunity, and no choice but to follow a path laid out for them by forces much stronger than they. In a deeper way, this movie is about the poor people who have fought rich men's wars throughout history.

The Deer Hunter was deeply anti-war - it was also deeply pro-American. Neither government hawks nor Jane Fonda Hollywood liberals liked this movie.

One part of this movie is even more endearing today than it was in the 1970's - setting the heart of it among the Eastern European, Ukrainian, Russian Orthodox church people of Western Pennsylvania; a hard-working white ethnic area of miners and steel-mill factory workers.

I don't know if I would recommend this movie to anyone who didn't live through that era. But I am richer for having seen it. It is a brilliant snapshot of an American time and place that is gone now.

Rating:
Summary: Fantasy Masquerading as Reality
Review: Of course the acting, directing, cinematography, etc. of this movie are all, by near universal consensus (and I don't exclude myself), simply first-rate. The main point of disagreement seems to be how necessary those VERY slow wedding scenes were to setting the backdrop for the rest of the movie.

My rejection of the movie as a thing of worth is based on one specific element: the Russian roulette scenes.

When I saw the movie, I was extremely moved, indeed haunted, by as much as, if not more than, anything else in the movie, the Russian roulette scenes. They are so powerful: de Niro's character helping the others pull through, the daring escape, their effect on Walken's character, who by the end of the movie is completely emotionally numbed/scarred by them, etc.

The movie portrayed these scenes so convincingly, and my own personal knowledge of the Vietnam war was sufficiently sparse, that I took it for granted, without even a second thought, that these scenes portrayed a phenomenon that was a legitimate part of the Vietnam War experience. And the thought that this was another of the horrors that U.S. soldiers had to face was very disturbing to me and lasted with me for a long time.

I found out years later that the Russian roulette scenes were a total fantasy, a fiction, a fake, a fabrication. That such scenes rarely, if ever, took place in the Vietnam War.

So what is the message of this movie? How I am supposed to treat seriously a movie which takes such pains to build up a realistic group of characters, sent to a horrible war that really did take place, come back and have to deal with real-life situations of apple-pie America, when a central pillar of the experience of the movie is total fantasy-land?

It is as if, instead of having the Russian roulette scenes, the movie had portrayed the soldiers being abducted by UFO's for a time, and showing the impact such an episode would have on them. Sound ridiculous? Of course it is! But therefore so too is inter-weaving a bizarre, surrealistic experience of Russian roulette, which bears no more relation to reality than a UFO escapade.

I object to the deception. I seriously doubt that I am the only person who was thus misled by the movie. It is simply lazy and manipulative to concoct such a fictitious scenario. Russian roulette, a forced game where the stakes are life and death and the outcome is dictated by the roll of the dice (so to speak), is a cheap, easy, artificial way to inject a sense of morbid tension and high drama into the movie.

If the movie-makers wanted to show us a movie which portrays the horrors of the Vietnam War, then please show us a movie which portrays the horrors of the Vietnam War! not a movie which portrays the horrors of your imagination! Was there not enough material of what the U.S. soldiers went through in Vietnam that you had to fabricate this Russian roulette nonsense?

I see one reviewer after another speak of the "realism" of this movie. In light of what I've written here, I just don't get it.

Rating:
Summary: I feel a lot of distance
Review: Of a more than three hours long movie this is the line that drew most my attention, as I consider this movie to be about the war aftermath rather than war itself. The people who went to this war became its very victims, as they were used for the whims of others.
This flawed but yet beautiful movie is divided in three parts: before, during and after Vietnam war, the happy-go-lucky attitude, the horror and disillusion. Many have complained about the overlength of the wedding scenes, but I guess it was Cimino's intention, as he first allows the viewer to get to know the main characters in order to "make him suffer" more later in the movie.
What comes after the wedding and the last time the guys were hunting together is much more controversial. As to this movie's realism, some of the things that bother me the most are the morality of Michael Cimino's attitude to his story-telling, his one sided approach of the war and his politically correct treatment of the vietnamese: all the atrocities portrayed in this film are committed by the Viet Cong. As for the highly controversial russian roulette contests scenes, which by the way are some of the most dramatic and most beautiful scenes ever to be captured by a camera, although they never really took place, they can be justifiable. The whole thing can be viewed as a metaphore, trying to depict the absurdity of the Vietnam War, as the whole movie itself is not a realistic, but a surrealistic work. Even the landscape is surrealistic. But even so, the question remains moot.
The best thing in this movie is certainly the acting. De Niro gives one of his best performances ever, especially in the Vietnam scenes and later on. When he comes back home he feels a tremendous void: he has serious problems connecting to people, as the war experience was too mindboggling for him to even try to talk about it. He makes you feel the devastation that touched America and how this war scarred forever its psyche. Chris Walken deserved the best supporting actor academy award he won that year for his part in this movie: his portrayal of the one descending slowly into madness is at least memorable. Meryl Streep is fantastic too: the chemistry between her and De Niro is obvious, but what I liked the most about her performance is her quiet inner nervousness, her inner trauma as she struggles between her loyalty to Nicky and her attraction to Michael and her need for some consolation. Savage and Cazale are excellent too.

The closing scene is one of the saddest I've ever seen in a movie, as they all sing a patriotic song in order to try and regain the natural feeling they once proved, all wrecked beyond repair, realizing that something has gone forever.
All in all a masterpiece, although a flawed film, but frankly, how many flawless masterpieces have you seen in your life?

Rating:
Summary: "Deer Hunter" is manipulative, but great acting
Review: While "Deer Hunter" was an important early movie dealing with the Vietnam War, it has its flaws which seem to magnify every time I see it. Like a lot of people, when I first saw it in a theater many, many years ago, I was shaken up, and believed that Cimino's movie was deservedly heading for the Oscars.

After a quarter-century I now believe the movie was deliberately manipulative and distorted. Yes, it's good that "Deer Hunter" showed how ordinary Americans' lives were warped and shattered by the war, but so did "Coming Home." But this is a very one-sided movie, a triumph of rugged machismo individualism (De Niro's character) over faceless, mindless adversaries. Why were they sent to Vietnam? What did they do? The battle scenes make no sense. How did they get captured? Cimino's chronic lack of focus has been picked up by others.

The Russian Roulette scenes are simultaneously classic and highly objectionable. I have yet to read of any documented instances of NVA or VC, who are depicted in this movie as soulless insect-like goons, forcing prisoners to do this. Likewise, I don't recall seeing anything about this catching on as a Saigon blood sport. This is a Hollywood conceit and artifice, and feeds American stereotypes and racial attitudes for the worse. The movie treats the Vietnamese as hopelessly alien sub-humans who inflict terrible things upon innocent Americans. It this is your bag, at least "Hanoi Hilton" tries to have some basis in fact.

The best thing about "Deer Hunter" is the acting. The young De Niro, Streep, and Walken are superb. What the movie makes them do is not their fault.

I will offend lots of people when I say that of movies that deal with the aftermath of soldiers' experiences in Vietnam, "Born On The Fourth of July" is a better and less objectionable movie.

Rating:
Summary: ...except it's not a "Vietnam" movie, folks
Review: The reviewer who gave it a rating of 1 probably experienced this film more fully than anyone who is viewing as part of the "Vietnam" pantheon. I think we need to be looking a bit more closely at what the filmmaker was trying to say and how he went about it.

A little secret... this movie is about how human beings (who are complex even when they're poor!) deal with traumatic events.

The first part of the movie sets up the characters and their respective situations and relationships, including the trauma of their current lives (in the good old US of A).

The second part is the "event". Oooooh. Get over it, it's not the point of the movie. Really.

From hospital in Saigon onward (when most people nod off) is where the filmmaker is getting to the point. This film is a treasure of themes and symbolism, probably too much so for most people. If you are interested in stories about real people, what symbols they can represent, and the intertwining of themes throughout a story, then you should not miss this film. View it at one sitting without distraction and you will likely come away profoundly affected.

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful Look At How the War Changed Us!
Review: For many of us who came of age during the Vietnam conflict, this was the first of many movies to treat with broad-brush approach the way the war raging across the ocean affected us so profoundly. And given its all-star cast of Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, John Savage, Meryl Streep and others, one can hardly question the level of seriousness and calculation with which the subject was broached. Yet in many ways this otherwise wonderful depiction of how so many working class boys became men and had their lives altered forever by the experience of Vietnam is flawed by its pedestrian treatment of the war itself.

Thus, while this is truly a wonderful work of entertainment, its tongue-in-cheek depiction of a band of buddies who enlist and serve together in Vietnam is sheer nonsense at the level of realistic portrayal of men in combat. The very idea that Viet Cong soldiers would knowingly arm any American soldier with a loaded weapon while in captivity strains to the point of credulity any subsequent dramatic effort that depends so strenuously on such an action. So too does DeNiro's suave and cavalier soldier of fortune pose, bedecked as it is with a stylish and rakish Van Dyke type beard and longish hair. As a special forces soldier, he would hardly have been so romantically attired or coiffed.

Please don't misunderstand me; this is a great film as long as it sticks to things found native in the American landscape, although the sequences depicting the deer slayer type scenes are not terribly accurate either. Yet somehow this small steel-town boy is some kind of phenomenal marksman, without much practice or explanation where this unusual skill came from. Yet in spite of these obvious shortcomings, DeNiro, Streep, and Savage add immeasurably to the level of the film through wonderful performances. Walken, as usual, is quite over the top, although the part itself is so far fetched that it is hard to see how he could have made it more believable or empathetic. The cinematography is evocative and stirring, and the combat scenes were shot in a topographical setting quite reminiscent of the tropical forests and the muddy rivers of Vietnam.

The true story is back at home, however, where the survivors have to do the best they can to string their broken lives back together in some semblance of meaningful adulthood in the wake of the devastation the war leaves in its wake. In that sense this is a very accurate portrayal of the way the war came home to change America forever. This is a terrific film; one wishes the director had opted for a little more realism and accuracy in his portrayal of the actual experience ion Vietnam. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: I'll keep this simple...
Review: This is definitely one of, if not the worst movie I have ever seen. It is horrible.

Rating:
Summary: "Home is the hunter...."
Review: Nominated for nine Academy Awards in 1978, The Deer Hunter received five for best film, best director (Michael Cimino), and best actor in a supporting role (Christopher Walken) as well as for editing and sound. It also generated a great deal of controversy immediately after its release, notably about the inclusion of Russian roulette contests which the Viet Cong require their prisoners to play; also about the portrayal of the Viet Cong themselves as heartless, bloodthirsty animals. Nonetheless, The Deer Hunter remains one of the most highly-regarded films about, arguably, the most unpopular war in which the United States has ever been involved. (Curiously, very few outstanding films have as yet examined another unpopular war, the so-called "police action" in Korea.) Guns of various kinds contribute to the film's dramatic impact. The pistols used in the aforementioned Russian roulette contests, of course, but also the rifles which Michael (Robert De Niro) and his buddies carry with them into the Pennsylvania mountains during their last deer hunt together before several report for military duty. Throughout the film, Michael remains the unquestioned leader of his friends in Clairton, a steel mill town, and takes personal responsibility for each of them.

Those who admire this film as much as I do have their own reasons. Here are mine. First, Michael's efforts to locate and save (in several different ways) Nick (Walken) during the last days of the war as well as his efforts to return Steven (John Savage) to Clairton from a veterans' hospital combine and illustrate so many of the film's basic themes. For me, these efforts also indicate how committed Michael is to friendship worthy of the name.

Also, the scenes in Clairton create a profoundly human frame-of-reference for the inhumanities which Michael and others experienced during the war in Viet Nam. This is especially true of Steven's wedding and reception, later when Michael strolls with Linda (Meryl Streep) to her job in the grocery store, and especially at the end of the film when they and their friends assemble in the tavern for breakfast and quietly sing "God Bless America." Vilmos Zsigmund was nominated for an Academy Award for his cinematography in 1978 but Days of Heaven was selected and I have no quarrel with that selection. The Deer Hunter deserved its nomination but, in my opinion, the other three (Heaven Can Wait, Same Time Next Year, and The Wiz) did not.

The third reason (among several others) for my great admiration of this film is that the impact of the war is so effectively dramatized in the lives of the central characters, of course, but also in the lives of their family members and friends in Clairton. In the same year (1978), another controversial film, Coming Home, was also released. Its focus is limited almost entirely to Sally and Bob Hyde's marriage (Jane Fonda and Bruce Dern) which gradually disintegrates, only in part because of Sally's involvement with Luke Martin (Jon Voight). In The Deer Hunter, the scope is much wider but the war's impact is no less destructive, notably in the lives of Nick, Steven, and his wife. The changes in Michael's life are also significant but at least he has gained some wisdom and, as the film ends, we are left with the thought that he and Linda will begin a new life together. There is an especially significant moment during the wedding reception when Michael and his friends attempt to engage a soldier in conversation. Only later do we realize how much of a harbinger the soldier's dark attitude is. He has already experienced and been changed by what yet awaits for Michael, Nick, and Steven.

Voight rather than De Niro received the Academy Award as best actor (as did Fonda as best actress) but The Deer Hunter and Cimino prevailed in competition with Coming Home and Hal Ashby. In my opinion, all deserved their nominations and each would have been a worthy recipient. One final opinion: In years to come, The Deer Hunter will continue to be held in high esteem but I doubt if that will also be true of Coming Home whose dramatic impact depends almost entirely on the performances by Fonda, Dern, and especially Voight.