Dear Hunter:

Rating: 8/10 (1 March 2006)

****SPOILERS**** The movie "The Deer Hunter" opens in the small Russian/American Orthodox community of Clairton Penn. back in 1967 with Steven,John Savage,getting married to Angela, Rutanya Alda. The next day Steven and his two close friends Michael & Nick, Robert De Niro & Christopher Walken, spend their their last day together hunting deer in the Pennsylvania woods before being drafted into the US Army.
Michael is a crack shot when it comes to bringing down a deer and proves it when he's the only one of the group that also included fellow steel workers Stanley and Axel, John Cazale & Chuck Aspegren. living by the rule "One shot is what it's all about" Michael puts that into practice in his hunting deers, he never has to shoot twice to make a kill. Later in the movie Michael sees that that motto of his can also effect him and his friends just like the deers he's been hunting all his adult life.
Sent to Vietnam as a member the elite 101th Airborne we see Michael run into both Nick and Steven during a communist assault on a village that their defending. A moment later the three, together with a number of Vietnamese villages, having been captured by the Viet Cong are being used in a morbid game of Russian Roulette by their Communist Vietcong captors.
Steven who refused to play the Vetcong death game is thrown into a underwater cage in the Mekong River where he's attacked by dozens of hungry and vicious water rats who almost chew his legs off. Both Michael & Nick are a bit luckier by playing Russian Roulett since Michael takes the chance by encouraging the Vietcong leader to put three bullets into the gun chamber not the usual one!
Michael playing the odds that his chances, together with Nick, is 50/50 he'll have if he's lucky three slugs to put between his commie torturers eyes and be able to put them out and escape with both Nick & Steven. As dangerous as an idea was it worked with the Vietcong getting all that's coming to them, in bullets and rifle butts, from a mad as hell Michael and even madder Nick.
If was later that the three friends are separated during the fighting and Michael is the only one who comes back home to Clairton Penn. in more or less one piece. Michael later finds Steven in a veterans hospital with both his legs amputated from the wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War and that Nick is categorized by he US Army as either AWOL dead or missing in South Vietnam
Searching for Nick, whom he promised to never leave behind, Michael finds that Steven at the Vet. hospital has been secretly getting scores of $100.00 bills over the last few months from someone in Saigon? That someone turned out to be the missing Nick! Michael travels 12,000 miles back to Vietnam to find and rescue Nick but there's just two hitches; first being able to get into South Vietnem with the country about to fall to the Communist North Vietnamese and second finding Nick and then seeing if he want's to be rescued and brought home in the first place.
Gut-wrenching movie about friendship in war and in peacetime with Michael trying to put the pieces of his life back together after he was tortured and de-humanized by his war experiences. Michael became so disgusted and angry with killing that when out hunting he couldn't even lift his rifle to aim at and shoot a deer back home in Penn., a sport which he used to enjoy more then anything else.
Going back to "Nam" in the spring of 1975 as the US supported South Vietnamese government was on the brink of being overthrown, with what little US personnel left at the US embassy in Saigon about to be air-lifted out of the country, Michael finds Nick playing for high stakes, his life, the brutal and inhuman game that took away his sanity while being held captive by the Vietcong years ago; Russian Roulette.
Almost unwatchable final 15 minutes as Michael tries to get poor and heavily drug addicted Nick to come back home with him. Michael even goes as far as of playing a game of "Spin the Bullet" himself to get Nick out of his self-destructive state. Nick had been lucky all these months in the gambling dens of Siagon winning thousands of dollars defying the odds of getting his brains blown out. This time, like Michael always said, "One shot is what It's all about" and it was that one and last shot or bullet that eventually did Nick in.
One of the best movies about war ever made that shows it for what it is "Hell on Earth" with a young, 28 year old, and at the time unknown Meryl Streep as Nick's, and and now Michael, long suffering girlfriend Linda. Linda together with Michael Steven and his wife Angela, and all of the friends that Nick left behind in Clairton, attending Nick's funeral sadly say goodbye to him. Later Nicks friends and family solemnly sitting together at the dinner table end the film singling "God Bless America" in what has to be one of the most touching and heart-rendering scenes ever put on film. P.S Michael did indeed keep his promise to Nick, he didn't leave him behind.