The Deer Hunter is one of those movies that I think benefited greatly from the timing of release more than anything else. At the time, the post-Vietnam gloom was felt in the nation and a lot of movies were released that dealt with the war. The Deer Hunter was released at just the right time. A year later, it would've been buried by the vastly superior Apocalypse Now. But instead, The Deer Hunter was the biggest award winner of the late-'70s Vietnam Movie boom.

However, there is a problem with the movie...

It's not that great.


"The Greatest Films Site" ( http://www.filmsite.org/deer.html ) sums up this movie well when it says the movie is "often pretentious, ambiguous, overwrought and excessive, and loosely edited, with under-developed character portrayals and unsophisticated, careless film techniques." All of the reasons why this is NOT a great movie.

The movie is presented in a three-act structure. The 1st Act, which introduces the characters, seems to go on forever. First, there are the scenes of the male characters constantly singing songs together (to indicate their "camaraderie" - This whole music binding stuff will be repeated again and again, as if the filmmakers saw some study that said "People like characters who sing more than characters who don't"). Then there's the long deer hunting sequence so that the whole "one shot" thing can be set up (which is explained as some sort of macho thing, instead of being something that's necessary to simply kill the deer before it can run away). After that, the movie then has the most unnecessarily long wedding sequence in movie history. So long that it's easy to forget that the movie isn't actually about a wedding. And, at the end of the wedding scene, DeNiro's Michael strips off his tuxedo and runs through the street naked. Why does he do this? Well, he is the "Deer Hunter" so is this possibly foreshadowing that the movie The Deer Hunter is wearing no clothes? I think the answer is Yes.

The movie spends so much time in this 1st Act, that it then cuts short the important 2nd Act, where the guys are in Vietnam. Because the guys first are shown fighting in Vietnam, but then - in a major jump cut that leaves out too much - they are instantly all prisoners of some sadistic Vietcong. The Vietcong keep them in a mostly underwater cage, and just bring them up for sadistic games of Russian Roulette. This section is well-known to be fictional, and although a lot of people think it's a great scene, it's actually rather stupid. The North Vietnamese were well know to torture POWs, but it was always to get confessions for propaganda reasons. Killing them via Russian Roulette doesn't fit into this at all. Anyway, the guys escape together (but don't even bother to also help the other prisoners escape) and are rescued by a helicopter. But one of them falls off the helicopter into the river, so Michael (Robert DeNiro) lets go to save him. Does the helicopter stop to rescue them from the river again, or call for another helicopter to come back to save them? Uhhmm, no. (I guess the pilot was too busy to waste his time with such minor things as saving lives.) So Michael has to rescue his friend alone, but then dumps him off to get medical aid without even trying to stay with him. (I guess he was too busy to make sure one of his best friends was all right.)

The 3rd and final Act deals with the guys returning home, so it's all overwrought melodrama from this point on, with Michael trying to regain his pre-War life and help his friends get their lives back, and the "one shot" making its return again as he tries to save his last friend still in Vietnam (in an ending you can see coming from a mile away).

In short, this is one sloppily-made, extremely pretentious movie. The only thing actually good about it is the acting, which is excellent across the board. But "great acting" does not equal a "great movie". After this, the director Michael Cimino next made the mega-flop Heaven's Gate, a movie which has been universally panned, and deservingly so. However, everything that's wrong with that movie was already present in The Deer Hunter. The fact is they are both bad movies.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older