Is that what all the fuss was about in 78?

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2003)

Is that it? Is that the famous Deer Hunter which provoked the studios into giving the same director a seemingly limitless budget for Heaven's Gate? What were they thinking? Perhaps from this distance in time it's hard for someone, already familiar with the string of very unpleasant Vietnam movies which followed, to appreciate the impact this movie made on first release. It must be said APOCALYPSE NOW , though earlier, stands up much better and is certainly superior in it's production values, direction and plot. Viewing THE DEER HUNTER in the 21st century , it seems like a rather dull character piece which just happens to involve a 'Nam subplot but could equally have been set in the 1940s and involve Iwo Jima or Anzio. It also features a massivly underedited wedding scene which goes on and on and on.OK for those interested in how it's done in a Russian Orthadox way, but very self indulgent of the director. In truth the wedding itself with endless dancing, and song adds almost nothing of remote importance to the movie. It colours the background, but that needed only a five minute sequence which, if edited well from the footage here, could have been quite visually arresting. It really seems a waste of what must be more than 30 minutes of film(maybe longer I wasn't counting, I was almost snoring).It also seems to ape THE GODFATHER in some respects. There are redeeming factors. Industrial Pensylvania with it's grim steel works and nightmare landscape, is well photographed, reminding us of the how the back streets of New York were presented in MIDNIGHT COWBOY. The glorious mountain country of the deer hunting scenes also looks great, but the plot is so dull,so predicatable and so heavily laced with allegories that it negates all those positive aspects. DeNiro is good. Nothing more. Walken is probably better, but then his role is more interesting. Streep actually looks really good - we forget how attractive she looked at this time before sinking herself into character roles that didn't require such. She plays her role well but it's woefully underwritten. War movie cliches abound, even if we allow for the fact most Nam films since have drawn heavily on THE DEER HUNTER , I am sure most of these 'war is hell' cliches had been formed in Audi Murphy and John Wayne movies decades earlier.The whole point of the title is a scene so predictable you can almost count yourself into it at first viewing. There's also some truly clumsy use of stock news footage of Saigon at the end of the war. It looks like someone pasted this in having forgotton to shoot the scene, and not relaised untill the movie reached the editing room! Even if the budget was small there was no need for this in my view . None of the stock footage images are of any great dramatic importance and could easily have been dropped altogether. All in all I must say a huge disappointment for a movie I have waited 20 years to catch and which has such a high rating in the all-time-greats. Like LORD OF THE RINGS it's a monument to hype over content.