The Deer Hunter
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Movie Reviews of The Deer Hunter
Movie Review: Mindless drinking to mindless killing
Summary: 1 Stars
The wedding scene. What's with the hour long wedding scene that goes nowhere? My time is worth more than listening to a senseless script. Maybe the plan was to show senseless American life of roughhousing, drinking and merrymaking next to senseless burning alive Vietnamese? If that's the point than I find this movie lacking.
I can get that hollywood thinks that American's are a bunch of rednecks in under a five minute scene. There is no need to paint a degrading and mindless hour long intro picture of the brave men and women that make up the vast majority of this country as being rediculous drunks.
how is this an Oscar winning movie?
Movie Review: An American masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
I dont think I've ever seen a film that is more tapped into the American spirit of the time than this film. The film spreads out before the viewer, you can almost smell the soot in the industrial town. The world here lives and breathes. Its masterfully crafted and its beautifully subtle. From the innocence and kinship of small town life to the mania and simmering anger being locked into factory work causes. Its all shown masterfully.
Of course the thing the film explains most vividly is the mental and spiritual damage war inflicts on both the individual and the community. Through the main analogy that runs through the film, it shows how people can get trapped in a cycle of anger and hatred. Reliving old situations over and over and over. This film brings this internal struggle that many soldiers go through into stark reality. It helps the casual viewer understand people who have gone through severe trauma, and how they get trapped in their own minds.
The film is just as relevant today as it was in the 70's. This should be required watching for anyone who is pro-war.
One of the great American films, that despite its intense content, never loses its humanity or love of life.
Movie Review: The sleaziest exploitation movie ever made!!!!!!
Summary: 1 Stars
Amazon should have a rating of minus five hundred stars to make it possible to adequately categorize this one. Well, while the USA was struggling with the social and psychological crises as the effects of their youth both being killed and tricked by the military leaders to into doing some meaningless killing in the Vietnam war, and then coming home to a society that did not want to talk about it or was only critizing their actions; somebody comes up with the perverse idea of using this a background for a totally apolitical and rascist movie that exploits generating banal and sentimental emotions with the cinema-goers.
Although faultlessly made and well acted, this is the single-most sleaziest movie I have ever seen. Had it come out in 2078, it would have been a high-class escapist movie for shallow ladies, much in the vein of the typical "doctor-novel", portraying totally uninteresting characters. And the Vietnam generation would then have passed a long time ago.....but in the late 70`s?????
I am not an American, I am from Norway and I was 19 when this crap came out, but if my family had been hurt by this war, I would have punched the director and the whole cast in their faces for exploiting one of the biggest post-World War II tragedies of the western societies, while families had lost some of their sons and had others ruined their lives forever on the mental plane(read: losing them a decade or two later).
To top it all off, the Asians are portrayed as sadistic and crazy Russian-roulette players (to make the audience feel even much more sorrow for the main characters by creating a terrible enemy to unify against), a phenomena that nobody have found any proof for at all. All lies!
I just can`t believe it and never will do so!! These people behind this movie have no respect whatsoever for others. They certainly made a lot of bread on this emotional porn of theirs. Shame on you!!!
Movie Review: An editing room paradox
Summary: 3 Stars
EDIT: After writing this review, I did a little research, and the makers were very aware of the problems that I point out in act one of the movie. They knew it was too long, etc. But the interesting thing is that they audience tested 2-3 different cuts of it, with much of the first hour trimmed down -- especially the wedding. And what they found, EVERY single time, was that they had solved the audience complaints about the first hour dragging, but that the the meat of the movie, and the powerful ending effected people a lot less. So, they obviously made the choice to keep the overly long 1st act for the benefit of the rest of the movie, and eat the complaints that it generated. I just wish that they had been able to find the right balance of the two, which kept eluding them. (Oh, I put it at 4 stars, the stupid interface won't let me change the 3 rating)
...............................Original
The first hour of this 3 hour movie, seemingly meant to build the dramatic framework for the rest of the movie by showing good old boys in their hometown doing all the normal things and does this well enough, but could have been a LOT shorter. I mean a lot shorter. (I also find it amusing that somehow their drive from Penn to the Washington Cascades to hunt seems to take only one night, but that is Hollywood)
The 'middle section' seemed a lot weaker than it should/could have been. It shows them in combat for five minutes, literally, but in a way that you are not even sure what is going on, and have absolutely no idea how they get captured. You have them against all possibility reunited (or maybe they were in the same unit to begin with, it doesn't tell, but that would be even worse as they almost totally stopped making regional units with whole famalies/towns in them after the civil war, and totally stopped during WW2.) Here, they should have cut a lot less. I concede that this part is not overly central to the narrative drive of the film and its purpose is merely setting up the key situations, but a film of this magnitude should not have weaknesses like that.
It is from their capture onwards that this movie gains strength and power, and eventually culminates in a VERY powerful ending -- the best best picture ending that someone could ask for.
As an aside: the plot synopsis above mentions that the Russian Roulette is a symbol for the futility of the war as a whole. After thinking about this, I can not see any real evidence for this in the story. I certainly agree that the war was futile (in the strongest possible way), but if the synopsis is correct and that symbolism was intended by the film makers, they did not portray it strongly enough for me to pick up on it.
For me it is a 'get used at a great price when you see it, film'. Unfortunately, I have to put it midway down the field of Viet Nam movies. I rate Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, and Born on the Fourth of July, as better all around movies, even if the magnitude of the emotional blast at the end is not as poignant in many of them. I rate it as much better than Hamburger Hill, Heaven and Earth and Once Were Soldiers.
The Deer Hunter has the potential to be almost/just as good as these the top ones; the story is strong enough, but the editing paradox they suffered severely hampers it, taking it from 5 to 4 stars.
Movie Review: The Deer Hunter
Summary: 5 Stars
I lived though this time period, with my husband drafted, and also some of this film was shot in my husbands old neighborhood.It sometimes hard to watch this film when it shows what happened to these group of friends and the impact on their lives and those around them.This would be true of any war, any place, but very memorable and well scripted. The actors come into your hearts and minds, and stay there.