There's that particularly infamous scene in "The Deer Hunter" that seems to remain more disturbing each time we view it, when Michael (Robert De Niro), a Vietnam veteran, tracks down a friend of his named Nicky (Christopher Walken), who never arrived home after the war and is eventually found in Saigon, playing Russian Roulette for money, his mind an utter mess. He might have been talking about Michael Cimino’s powerful, sprawling, politically murky 1978 film, The Deer Hunter, which is reissued this week in … Vietnam was different to Iraq and Afghanistan in one vital respect: the soldiers were drafted. 100. Tattooed Dragon. The film opens with the three main characters and some friends leaving a steel mill, they go to a bar and drink, we get a quick scene of Meryl Streep getting beaten up by her Dad, then back to the main characters. While it's fair to argue that The Deer Hunter contains moments of brilliance, the film as a whole is undone by its length. 4.0 out of 5 stars The Deerhunter, the horrors of the Vietnam War. To my mind, The Deer Hunter is a major achievement in American movies. Brutally memorable, The Deer Hunter is an emotionally draining production that draws a vivid portrait of its characters and their milieu--and succeeds in showing the devastating effect of the war on their lives, as well as their brave attempts at renewal. Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2014. The director, Michael Cimino, on his second movie, has an incredible, prodigal gift for making movies, knowing that editing is the shape and life behind film. Read full review. Epic war drama is extremely intense and graphically violent. The Deer Hunter Review A group of friends who work in steel mills prepare to go to war by taking a trip into the mountains to kill dear. Of the four major Vietnam war films made in the dozen years following the fall of Saigon, The Deer Hunter was the first and, in the minds of some critics, the best. The performances are unforgettable, particularly by Christopher Walken as the dreamy, masochistic, Russian-looking Nick. It is about any of those things that you choose, if you choose, but more than anything else, it is a heartbreakingly effective fictional machine that evokes the agony of the Vietnam time. "The Deer Hunter" is said to be about many subjects: About male bonding, about mindless patriotism, about the dehumanizing effects of war, about Nixon's "silent majority." Parents need to know that The Deer Hunter, director Michael Cimino's 183-minute, 1978 epic, uses extreme violence to underscore the brutality of war and men's best and worst tendencies. The Deer Hunter looks just as good now as it ever did and it's a shame that Cimino, like John Milius, can't get to make proper films anymore. Powerfully acted by all involved (especially Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep) and infused with numerous gut-wrenching scenes. All rights reserved. One of the earliest attempts by Hollywood to process the traumatic memories of the Vietnam war was The Deer Hunter, directed by Michael Cimino in 1978. Mike (Robert DeNiro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steve (John Savage), steelworkers in a gray, run-down Pennsylvania town, are ordinary, blue-collar guys who's chief amusements run to drinking and pool. Michael and the others gather in John's saloon. His … The wayward, maddening screenplay succeeds only in working up a gruesome melodramatic later -- hardly the catharsis promised by a bold treatment of the wounds of our most divisive war. (The other three being Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, and Platoon. According to Vanity Fair, … The Deer Hunter is a rich and powerful picture that without a trace of patronisation or the slightest touch of cultural superiority, speaks eloquently for the inarticulate. The Deer Hunter ends with Nick's funeral. MICHAEL CIMINO'S "The Deer Hunter" is a big, awkward, crazily ambitious, sometimes breathtaking motion picture that comes as close to being a popular epic as … and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango. Forgot your password? "The Deer Hunter" Review : Writer/Director Michael Cimino's five-time Oscar winning film, "The Deer Hunter", is a powerful and insightful look at the impact of the Vietnam war on a small USA town starring Robert DeNiro, John Cazale, Christopher Walken, Meryl Streep and John Savage. 5.0 out of 5 stars The Deer Hunter. )However, while it’s fair to argue that The Deer Hunter contains moments of brilliance, the film as a whole is undone by its length. Vietnam was different to Iraq and Afghanistan in one vital … The idea of sacrifice permeates everything, along with the cruelty and horror. Michael Cimino's bold and brilliant Vietnam war epic The Deer Hunter is re-released; 36 years on, the film's combination of sulphurous anti-war imagery, disillusion and patriotic melancholy is even more striking. We will first review his arguments and then we will analyze them. Here is where Mikey and Nick have a dimly conceived belief that the hunter's vocation is austere and manly and the deer's death noble and ennobling, unlike the gruesome chaos of war in south-east Asia, where they are captured and forced to take part in a hideous Russian roulette death cult. Stark and haunting, and still unbearable to watch at times, The Deer Hunter remains a powerful movie experience. After the early acclaim, The Deer Hunter has been subjected in recent months to an extraordinarily coarse and brutal hazing. Who’s Going to Win Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor at the 2021 Oscars? Sign up here. THE DEER HUNTER – Review by Pat Kincaid [Workers Vanguard] November 27, 2017 The Deer Hunter has done what The Green Berets could not do more than a decade ago: it has moved audiences to actively root for the American military fighting the Vietnam war. The depiction of Vietnam, and then the subsequent aftermath in the third act of the film, is more potent and visceral because we feel the impact of the war on an entire community, not just on the three men we follow there. "The Deer Hunter" is an ambitious, unflinching and haunting movie that comes close to being the quintessential "American" film in its devastating portrayal of common folk coping with horrendous circumstances. and the Terms and Policies, Don't have an account? I’m not 100% sure if this is the original audio mix or it has been remixed and re-encoded or not. They had no choice. The movie itself is amazing, a classic that everyone should see and appreciate. The film ultimately works because of the inherent dramatics of the script, the magnificent cinematography/editing and the performances of Walken, DeNiro and Streep. Three Pennsylvania steelworkers, Mikey (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage), obey Uncle Sam's call to fight in Vietnam, leaving behind wives and sweethearts, including shopworker Linda (Streep) who may be in love with more than one of them. It has no more moral intelligence than the Clint Eastwood action pictures, yet it's an astonishing piece of work, an uneasy mixture of violent pulp and grandiosity, with an enraptured view of common life -- poetry of the commonplace. The Deer Hunter: Official Clip - One Last Shot, The Deer Hunter: Official Clip - God Bless America, The Deer Hunter: Official Clip - The Deer Hunter. ...certainly a bit long and could use some trimming. Copyright © Fandango. The Michael Cimino film went on to win five Oscars at the 51st Academy Awards, including best picture. Cimino lied about his military service while making and promoting the film. Winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, The Deer Hunter is simultaneously an audacious directorial conceit and one of the greatest films ever made about friendship and the personal impact of war. Sidney Poitier’s 7 Most Memorable Performances, All Harry Potter Movies Ranked Worst to Best by Tomatometer, Golden Tomato Awards: Best Movies & TV of 2020. The movie won five Oscars and, if anything, improves with age. “The Deer Hunter” arrives on 4K UHD Blu-ray with the same DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio codec and configuration previously found on the original 2012 Blu-ray release of the film. The weather outside is grey and cold. Again small talk and efforts to convey what they are feeling give way to silence. Read 16 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. This R2 DVD presents the film reasonably well but it's nothing special and certainly not worth the £20 RRP. Full Review. Verified Purchase. Richard Propes TheIndependentCritic.com. The film was praised for its depiction of realistic working-class settings and environment; Cimino's direction; the performances of De Niro, Walken, Streep, Savage, Dzundza and Cazale; the symphonic shifts of tone and pacing in moving from America to Vietnam; the tension during the Russian roulette scenes; and the themes of American disillusionment. The Deer Hunter’s combat sequence, as numerous critics pointed out, is an inversion of the common operations in which U.S. soldiers sought to “pacify” villages by burning them down, and more specifically of the March 1968 My Lai massacre in which U.S. soldiers slaughtered between four and five hundred Vietnamese civilians, mainly women and children. And I fervently hope that the American public won't vote me wrong. Before they leave, they attend Steven's wedding: a ceremony in which, without realising it, they are saying goodbye to their old lives. It focuses on a group of Pennsylvania steel-workers, some of whom are going off to fight just days after one of their number has got married. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex, ichael Cimino's bold and brilliant Vietnam war epic The Deer Hunter is re-released; 36 years on, the film's combination of sulphurous anti-war imagery, disillusion and patriotic melancholy is even more striking. Thomson says The Deer Hunter isn't really about the Vietnam War, but rather "the terrible burden of American manhood." David Axeen’s virulent critic of The Deer Hunter depicts Cimino’s film as being racist and simplistic. David Axeen starts describing the movie as a Western, adopting all his values, and denies any affiliation to a new genre that would rise above this old type of films. A decidedly bitter, realistic, and harrowing anti-war epic. "The Deer Hunter," which opens today at the Coronet, is an update on the national dream, long after World War II when America's self-confidence peaked, after the Marshall Plan, after Korea, dealing with people who've grown up in the television age and matured in the decade of assassinations and disbelief. On Dec. 8, 1978, Universal released the 183-minute Vietnam war drama The Deer Hunter. Stanley Myers and John Williams will blow you away with this soundtrack. The Deer Hunter is a work of staggering scope and ambition: an epic treatise on the malignancy running through American civilian and political life in the 1970s. Upon its release, The Deer Hunter received acclaim from critics, who considered it as the best American epic since Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Translate review to English. It’s the wedding of Steven (John Savage) that dominates the first third of the movie. T… All join in this spontaneous act. Sacrifice colours everything in this re-released classic about three US army conscripts to the Vietnam war, Cannon fodder … The Deer Hunter. The Deer Hunter is a movie of bad guys and good guys, and the bad guys are not us. The Deer Hunter book. A simple, much-forgotten fact slaps you in the face after watching The Deer Hunter. The soundtrack fits so perfectly with this movie, they go together so well. Its vision -- an effort to weave the inferno of Vietnam into the homespun texture of American life -- is effectively realized and savagely gripping. Share on Facebook ... Andrew Stuttaford is the editor of National Review 's Capital Matters. Please enter your email address and we will email you a new password. (I haven't watched this since it first came out in 1978; this time I literally gasped at how beautiful a 29-year-old. These "folk" are not superheroes but they are caught up in the myths of American might and honor and glory and the grimness of reality. The Deer Hunter is a movie of three acts with the main characters being Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken and some other guy. By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy [The Deer Hunter] is the most ambitious attempt to grapple with the subject that has yet been released. This is Cimino's masterpiece. A simple, much-forgotten fact slaps you in the face after watching The Deer Hunter. Unlike the broad strokes of Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, the 1979 best-picture Oscar-winner provides a more personal take on the human casualties of the Vietnam War. These guys like nothing more than a laugh, a drink and hunting deer in the mountains. (Seymour Hersh had published the first … Both a 50GB Blu-ray disc and standard-def DVD are included in the package. The lives of three great friends are ruined when the Pennsylvania steelworkers join the army, see hideous combat in Vietnam, and suffer post-traumatic stress. 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