Before Heaven's Gate there was...The Deer Hunter

Rating: Null/10 (29 March 2003)

So i must be one of the last people on earth to watch the Deer Hunter. It was OK in parts..but it was WAY over long. going for almost 3 hours, a lot of which i thought was taken up with very boring sequences (I thought that Russian wedding was never going to end). As for the Vietnam bits, I can understand why this film has received some criticism. The only Vietnamese men in the movie are bloodthirsty savages who wager on a (fictitious) game in which people commit suicide (and the few Vietnamese women in the movie are prostitutes). I was asking myself 'what's in it for the guys pulling the trigger???'. I think Michael Cimino went from this movie to making "heaven's gate" which is widely recognized as one of the all time big-budget clunkers in American movie history. But quite frankly i can see the seeds of that in this movie. I think the only reason it got so much recognition in its day was the immediacy of the vietnam war.