Compelling study of the effects of war, excellent in parts but not incisive enough as a whole.

Rating: 8/10 (1 October 2006)

The Deer Hunter is a powerful, disturbing, but somewhat overlong film about life for a group of young American steelworkers before, during and after Vietnam. In fact, this was one of the first films to deal with the Vietnam conflict. The middle section, set in SE Asia and dealing with the experiences of the men in a Vietcong prison camp, spares us nothing whatsoever in its depiction of the horrors of war.
Three young Pennsylvanian steelworkers head off to fight in Vietnam. First, there's Michael (Robert De Niro), an emotionally strong and determined type who is almost homo-erotically protective of his friends. Then there's Steven (John Savage), an unassuming and naïve guy who gets married just before heading off to war. Finally, there's Nick (Christopher Walken), outwardly a normal everyday guy but after the fighting the most emotionally shattered of the trio. After attending Steven's wedding, the guys head up into the mountains for a deer hunt. Soon after that, they head for 'Nam, where they are captured by the Vietcong and imprisoned in a half-submerged swamp POW camp. Occasionally the men are taken out of their cages and forced to play Russian Roulette by their captors, a lethal game in which two men take it turns to place a gun loaded with one bullet against their head  the loser being the unlucky one who clicks the trigger when it gets to the loaded chamber. After traumatic experiences in the Vietcong prison, the three guys finally escape but are separated as they make their getaway. After various adventures, Michael makes it back to America, where he discovers that Steven is now a crippled paraplegic following an accident during his escape from the Vietcong. Worse still, he learns that Nick is still in Vietnam, no longer a US soldier but instead a suicidal wreck who plays Russian Roulette night after night in seedy alleys and bars to make money. Michael returns to Vietnam to persuade Nick to come back home with him, but finds the nihilistic influence of war has pushed Nick's mind beyond the point of no return.
The performances in the film are absolutely brilliant. De Niro is memorable as a natural born survivor. Savage evokes aching sympathy as the just-married kid who ends up wheelchair-bound before he can enjoy fulfilment with his wife. John Cazale is terrific as Stan, one of the guys from back home who doesn't go to war and who cannot understand how it is that his friends come back so dramatically altered. And best of all is Walken, simply stunning as the vulnerable man who becomes locked in a doomed obsession with the game of Russian Roulette. Less impressive is the rambling script by Deric Washburn, which features heavy-handed symbolism and fails to make any of the film's three main sections as incisive as they ought to be. The script rises to moments of undeniable power, but in between there's a lot of meaningless extraneous detail to be waded through. The moving score by Stanley Mann and John Williams is actually lifted from an earlier film (The Walking Stick, released in 1970) but suits the mournful mood of this film just as perfectly. Heavily symbolic and flawed as it is, The Deer Hunter is still a tremendously compelling movie. and it actually grows in stature the more times you watch it.