5/5 Classic
  by GForcum (Ceres, CA)
A classic with many stars. Paints a picture of survival after the war and is a real eye opener.

1/5 Clipping my toenails was more entertaining!
  by Philip Michaels
Oh my, where do we start! One long and tedious film. Who wrote the script? It seems to me all actors were just ad-libbing their lines. Don't even ask me how it
won best picture. Was 1978 that bad of a year for movies? This film is only for die hards of De Niro or strange war films.

4/5 great movie
  by neptune nac (Los Angeles, CA)
I've seen this movie before, but I had forgotten the plot since then. I appreciate it more seeing it again. You can see what the actors look like when they were young, compare their acting then and now, and also see how well the movie was made then.



5/5 In the first rank of American film-making.
  by Alastair N. Mcleod (San Diego, California)
I watched Michael Cimino's The Deerhunter again recently, some thirty years after I first saw it. It remains a remarkable film, a piece of powerful story-telling, a coming-together of fine actors and fine acting, engrossing scene-setting, careful character-building, and deep meaning. I was struck most forcefully on this second viewing by two things: the film's foreshadowing of American decline, and its testament to the power of myth.

The America of The Deerhunter, the massive industry, the doughty immigrants, the omnipresence of Detroit, the mysticism of guns and hunting, the wealth that made the war, and the way it was waged, possible--all that is gone now, or going. Did Cimino see that it was being destroyed, that Viet Nam was destroying it, or is it just very easy to see now that that was when the darkness began to take hold?

In the final scene of the film, the main characters are gathered for breakfast after the funeral of the friend who destroyed himself in Southeast Asia. One man is legless and broken, another alienated forever from his civilian friends by the knowledge of what the war really was. Their women are emotionally shattered. The men who stayed at home are well-meaning but lost. The gathering is awkward, grief-laden, every participant burdened with the incomprehensible. What has happened is not what should have happened, not what anyone ever dreamed could happen, not what anyone knows how to live with. And what do they do? They begin hesitantly, spontaneously to sing together, God Bless America. What else can they do? They have no other story to live by.

It is an extraordinarily touching, delicate moment, vibrant with human truth, a grand anti-climax to a story of heroism, community, patriotism, friendship, and madness, of failed faith. This is a film by a man who understands our country, believes in it, but has the courage and the gentleness to relieve of us our illusions about it, if we will allow him to. We need this film now, as we needed it when it was made, when we could not fully understand what it was telling us.

5/5 War Changes...Everything
  by D. S. Thurlow (Alaska)
1979's Gut-wrenching classic "The Deer Hunter" was Director Michael Cimino's masterful capture of a time ten years earlier, when the Vietnam War was in full swing but hadn't yet caused much of the country to go sideways over it.

The movie opens in a small Pennsylvania steel town, where a group of young steelworkers attend a wedding for one of their own, then take off on a deer hunt. This long sequence introduces us in a measured and honest way to the three young men, and one woman, at the heart of the story.

The movie then shifts to Vietnam, where the three young men are taken captive in combat by the Vietcong. The three will escape, in the harrowing but iconic Russian roulette scene, but each will be damaged by the experience in different ways.

The third portion of the movie concerns the return of one of the young men to their hometown, to find much has changed, including himself. He and the young woman will try to patch together what remains of the life they had known before Vietnam. That quest will trigger a return to Vietnam to fulfill a final promise.

Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken, and John Savage as the three young men, and Meryl Streep as the young woman, are the best of a superb cast. The story, the dialogue, and the settings are authentic to the time and place, almost painfully so. The movie's principal flaw may be the choice of Russian roulette, an obscure event at best, as the pivot of the plot, when more plausible plot twists were certainly available. The movie works extraordinarily well in spite of this flaw, and perhaps because of it. "The Deer Hunter" is now thirty years on but has lost none of its capability to move the viewer, and is very highly reocmmended.