It lost me...

Rating: 1/10 (15 July 2005)

I hired The Deer Hunter after a number of people recommended it to me. I thought they were serious. I honestly cannot believe this film is so highly regarded when nothing actually happens. There is three whole hours of nothing. I haven't been so full of hatred for a film since I was forced to watch "the Piano" (another very boring and overrated waste-of-space).
Alright, it started out looking good and interesting, showing the very harsh conditions of a Pennsylvania steel mill. It captured my interest. That was in the first five minutes.
Then, we are treated to about 55 minutes of a mind-numbingly boring wedding scene. God knows what happened to the editor, but he must have been drunk or on strike or something because what should have been a five- or ten-minute brief explanation became a drawn-out and long-winded dance scene! Next there's maybe fifteen minutes of the main characters going out into the wilderness and murdering a few animals for their own entertainment.
Now we finally get into the "war" scenes. When I hired this film I was led to believe that it was in fact a "war" movie. No, it really isn't. Vietnam may be involved and feature part-way through the story, but this is definitely NOT a war movie. All we get is a few seconds of Viet Cong brutality, then a flamethrower and some American choppers dropping off a squad or two of well-equipped soldiers.
All of a sudden, we are transported into some kind of Viet Cong mobile water torture station, where unfortunate American (and other Vietnamese, probably South Vietnamese) soldiers are forced to play Russian Roulette for entertainment and gambling purposes. They get slapped around, thrown into rat-infested, half-submerged pits and generally mistreated by the evil VC.
Don't get me wrong, the first Russian Roulette scene was very tense and I did hope that Robert DeNiro would blow a hole in the head of the VC leader.
However, this is all that happened in the film. After that, nothing at all happened. I gave up just before the two-hour mark. It was just too much tripe for me. I could not believe it was rated so highly. Nothing happened in two god-damn hours! A long-winded wedding, a boring hunting scene and a very poor attempt at a war scene.
I stopped watching after two hours. The garbage was finally beginning to get to me. So, to all those who adore and blindly praise this film, I have to ask you: Did you actually watch it, or were you just jumping on the Every-Academy-Award-Winner-Must-Be-Good train? It may well have been a great cinematic work in 1978, but today it certainly doesn't stand up against other older war movies.
If you haven't watched The Deer Hunter yet...don't bother. Instead go watch a decent Vietnam film - such as Platoon or Full Metal Jacket. Otherwise, you're just wasting three hours of your life.