Saturday 9 July 2011

The Deer Hunter - review

I made a new year's resolution to watch films which I'd never seen, but are considered classics.  During this venture I've watched such films as, It's a wonderful life, Casablanca, 2001 a space odyssey and Planet of the Apes.  Last night I watched The Deer Hunter for the first time, this is my review.

Warning, this review contains spoilers




The Deer Hunter is a movie of three acts with the main characters being Robert DeNiro, Christopher Walken and some other guy.

The film opens with the three main characters and some friends leaving a steel mill, they go to a bar and drink, we get a quick scene of Meryl Streep getting beaten up by her Dad, then back to the main characters.  If I make it sound like there's not much happening, it's because there isn't.  There's very little dialogue between the main characters and what they do say is mumbled or unimportant.

Then we get into the official first act which is the characters at a wedding reception, this first act of the movie is about an hour long, nothing happens.  When you have a movie in which you intend to build the tension or develop characters, you should really develop the characters.  All we learn in the first hour of the movie is that Meryl Streep has an abusive father, she's pregnant and engaged to Walken, the baby isn't his, but he intends to raise it anyway.  De Niro is the leader of the group and they're all due to head out to Vietnam.  That's about it.

By the end of the hour, the only shit you give about the characters is based on the actors who play them, they are basically cut out characters, they have no deep defining moments, no gems of dialogue, it's long, it's boring.  Long time fans are going to argue with me on this, but I honestly think that this first hour could be boiled down to twenty minutes and nothing of value would be lost.

The men leave the reception and go off to hunt a deer, they shoot a deer, Walken says he prefers to kill deer with one shot.

Vietnam!

De Niro is hiding in a bush whilst a Viet Cong shoots an injured woman carrying a baby, who falls down and is subsequently eaten by pigs.

I haven't cut anything out of the plot summary at all.  That is literally what happens, they are hunting deer, then De Niro's in a bush and a woman is being eaten by pigs.

The next paragraph details exactly what happens in the movie at this point, I've not skipped anything, this is exactly what happens.

De Niro jumps up and burns the soldier to death with a flame thrower.  We see Walken and SomeOtherGuy in a helicopter and then they land and Walken is surprised to see De Niro, the camera zooms in on some soldiers walking in the distance.  The camera then goes down a river and a Vietnamese(?) guy is a poking a bamboo cage in the river with a stick as he stands on the dock of a river hut.  De Niro, Walken and SomeOtherGuy are in a cage beneath the hut up to their chests in water.

This is exactly how it happens in the movie, I even rewound to make sure that the dvd didn't skip a scene by mistake.  One minute they are in a field flame throwering people, the next minute they are in a bamboo cage.

How did they get captured?  When did they get captured?  Who captured them?  Who are the other Vietnamese people in the cage with them?  What happened to their helicopter?  What happened to the other soldiers they were with?  Don't focus on these questions for too long, because the film decides they aren't important enough to answer in this film.

Their capturers who from this point we shall call the eBil!Soldiers are having fun with their prisoners by forcing them to play Russian Roulette.  The prisoners are pulled out one by one and have a headband wrapped around their heads to disguise the blood squibs and are forced to pull the trigger against their own heads until someone loses.  SomeOtherGuy freaks out and De Niro comforts him while Walken looks on with the same reaction shot four or five times till it's SomeOtherGuy and De Niro's turn in the game.  SomeOtherGuy points the gun more or less towards the ceiling, pulls the trigger and skims his head with a bullet.  The eBil!Soliders point and laugh as SomeOtherGuy cries, freaks out and then is dragged away to the river cage whilst a stage hand drops a rat on his face which drops into the water to presumably drown.

De Niro is returned to the cage under the hut for a quick plan with Walken, the eBil!Soldiers for some reason fire a gun into the cage which misses them and they plot their escape, De Niro is sure they leave SomeOtherGuy, but Walken insists they take him with them.

De Niro and Walken are put into the game and they convince the dumb, eBil!Soldiers to give them more bullets which they use to help them escape.  They grab SomeOtherGuy and float off on a tree branch, a helicopter finally turns up, but only Walken gets aboard as SomeOtherGuy falls into the water, breaking his legs and De Niro dives in after him.

Walken is taken to a military hospital where he has plot contrived amnesia, De Niro runs into a caravan of people getting the fuck out of town and dumps SomeOtherGuy on them.  Instead of sending Walken back to America, he is allowed to wander aimlessly through Saigon's red light district where he meets AFrenchDude, who gets him into Russian roulette games.  Walken enters and pulls shenanigans by shooting at his opponent as well as himself which understandably upsets the crowd, De Niro turns up at one point, but fails to get Walken's attention and Walken drives off with AFrenchDude.

Act three!

De Niro returns to the US and since he thinks that both SomeOtherguy and Walken are dead it's ok for him to get together with Meryl Streep.  He goes hunting with his friends from the beginning of the film, but is unable to shoot a deer because he doesn't want to kill anything else.

Eventually he goes looking for SomeOtherGuy and discovers he's in a veteran's hospital and someone has been sending him buttloads of cash every month from Saigon and also he has no legs.  De Niro is now convinced that it's Walken who is sending the money and heads out to find him.

He tracks him down eventually in a Russian Roulette bar and concludes that Walken thinks De Niro and SomeOtherGuy are dead, but also still has amnesia, then who the hell is sending the money?  De Niro put himself in the game, Walken doesn't seem to know who he is, (who is sending the money?  why doesn't he just wait for Walken or ask to speak to him?) De Niro notices track marks in Walken arms.  Walken who is all spaced out and says 'One shot' with a smile as De Niro reminds him, then Walken shoots himself in the head and dies.

De Niro takes Walken's body home and they have a funeral for him, God Bless America, The End.

At three hours long, this is film is long and feels long.  Mostly because very little happens in it and despite what the movie's defenders have told me in the past you can't easily say it's a movie about characters because we don't get to really get to know the characters.  We get the idea that these people are great friends and have been all their lives, but this is always something we're told rather than have it demonstrated on screen.  The dialogue is awkward and usually quiet whenever there is any, often a lot of the scenes involve a lot of changing camera angles and stuff which you can't really class as scenery porn because we're not looking at beautiful scenery, we're just looking at random shit.

I don't see Vietnam movies as Vietname movies, to me they're just war movies, maybe this is because I'm 29 and it was long over by the time I was born, maybe it it's because I'm English and as I understand it, the US lost that war pretty badly.  I'm sure that Vietnam vets had a pretty rough time out there and to someone who lived through the experience this movie will have a totally different kind of resonance, but as an Englishman seeing this 33 year old movie for the first time I can only judge it from it's merits from my own point of view.

I can't even give three of the greatest actors of all time, De Niro, Streep and Walken, any props for their performances because they just didn't have any scenes in which they could show off the subtle nuances of their craft with an inspired speech or a mental breakdown.  I honestly do not see what it is about this movie which gets it lauded as one of the greatest movie of all time.  There's practically no character development, barely a plot and insubstantial dialogue.

2 out of 10

40 comments:

  1. Amateur review. Flippant and superficial.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Amateurish review? Yes. Does this make him wrong about the film? No. It's a complete sack of shit.

      And by the way, I doubt the author cares much for the accusation of being amateurish. That's clearly his intention - not trying to be a professional critic but offer a layman's opinion. And he echoed what I experienced after watching this 'classic', while making me laugh.

      Delete
  2. Its like you read my mind! You appear to know so much about this, like you wrote
    the book in it or something. I think that you could do with some pics
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    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. linda is not pregnant to nick its angela the bride whos pregnant and not to steven the groom or some other guy as you say its also de niro who says one shot not walken i quit reading then because you are a dumbass

      Delete
  3. Actually, the reviewer is correct. This movie is rather full of itself. All three guys are CLEARLY too old for draft age; they're working in the steel mills and I guess we're supposed to believe they're all 26 and younger (when in fact Walken and DeNiro are CLEARLY in their mid-to-late 30s at that point).

    They get captured and, yes, there's NO explaining how they get caught. They see each other, (by the way, how did Robert DeNiro, a draftee, become a Sergeant in less than a year?), there's an explosion, they casually say "We gotta get out of here" and then, BAM, they're POWs.

    I saw the movie back in the early 80s and a couple of times since...if being 'deep' is not explaining ANYTHING and not developing the characters, this movie was deep. Otherwise, it was pretentious, horribly researched and just about the most overrated war movie ever, and the most overrated movie of the time.

    ReplyDelete
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  20. A terrible review. You can't even get the actors to the right characters. The first hour dragged but it was important that we saw how close they were because it established the stake of the story, so when they're in Vietnam we care that much more about them, and the roulette scenes are that much more devastating. Some beautiful scenes in this movie, the mumbled dialogue was a testament to the naturalness of the story, it all felt very real. Just a terrible review.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It was important that we felt dragged through the traditional ceremony to make point of how America doesn't even really question or care why she does something. We just do it because we're supposed to.

      Delete
  21. I absolutely agree, this movie was dissapointing and empty. I expected a lot more, but all "war horrors" center around russian roullette which was never played in POWs camps. And there is no war at all. Waste of 3 hours of our life. I prefer real Vietnam movies like 84 Charly Mopic, Platoon etc.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Meh, I understand that you have to put on this character to get people to read you, but you gotta re-watch Walken breaking down in the hospital. That's all I'm sayin'.

    ReplyDelete
  23. It's almost considered sacrielige by some to criticise 'The Deer hunter' but in my opinion it's one of the most overrated films ever, it could have been heavily edited but still been overlong and tedious, I watched it years ago when VHS was all the rage and finding it slow, pretentious boring and self indulgent and when I chanced upon it for £1 in a budget shop decided to give it another view just to see if I didn't 'get it', I actually had to watch the 'acts' in three different sessions and it's an experience I never want to repeat, the DVD is now on the shelves of a local charity shop.

    ReplyDelete
  24. This review is spot-on. The movie is an hour and a half too long, with side-stories to nowhere, emphasis more on "character development" (of which there is only the scantest amount) than on explaining what's actually happening. This film is the most boring 3+ hour mess since Lawrence of Arabia (another one of the most overrated films of all time).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Get off the reefer. Lawrence of Arabia is a great film.

      Delete
  25. Your review is ignorant and lazy. You leave out major plot points and can't even get the storyline straight. If you take the time to really watch a movie and do not like it, that is fine. All you did was half watch a movie and write a review call it overrated and boring.

    ReplyDelete
  26. Agree Deer Hunter very Overrated. 3 hours of boredom
    Page 1

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  27. Agree Deer Hunter very Overrated. 3 hours of boredom
    Page 1

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  28. Have always thought the same since the first watch. They could completely knock off the first hour and begin with Deniro in the bush in Vietnam and nothing would be lost. That would bring it down to two hours. I agree nothing, absolutely nothing is explained about how they are captured. That entire scene with the awful acting of Walken and Someotherguy jumping up and down as they "coincidentally" ran into Deniro whom cooly ignores them as he shuffles by them to a helicopter that has aparently left them to a ghost army that apparently captures them a second later with a secret weapon that instantly transports them to that bamboo pow camp on the river. Then the movie begins. It lasts about ten minutes and is entirely in that pow camp that is literally the size of a shed. After escaping they leave behind the weapons they used to escape which must be symbolic of the viewer being transported back into a shitty movie that is a waste of time, full of helicopter pilots that take off without waiting for anyone to actually board the craft, the 3 escapees see a helicopter fly by with some soldier dangling from the landing gear. This will soon be Deniro and Someotherguy's fate as they too get picked up from the same helicopter which does exactly what I just said dropping them into the water where someotherguy somehow breaks a leg which turns to both at some point that have to be amputated. Deniro is unscathed. An hour goes by and Deniro ends up in a room with walken who shoots himself 30 seconds later. But it's not over yet. They torture you for another half an hour with a funeral scene that should have also been cut from the movie. In actuality this entire film could be told in 15 minutes. Overrated indeed.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Cool review, The Deer Hunter has always bored me to death. OVERRATED

    ReplyDelete
  30. The boredom of the first act of the film is extremely important to the emotional explosion that happens once we get to Vietnam. The build up is slow and pretty normal, it’s everyday life and we actually establish a lot of important information about the characters. We learn De Niro is the leader, We learn that John Savage is not going to hack it and learn the Nick is unsure of where he stands in life. However the most important thing about the first act of the film is that it’s vastly different from everything that we see once they go the Vietnam, its slow, problems they have are minor in comparison and it subconsciously makes us ill prepared for what is about to happen. This whole act is extremely important to when De Niro comes home. Everything goes back to normal but feels slightly different, it’s slow and a little dull; however now everything is unsettled and out of place. You don't have to like the film but when reviewing its about more then if something is boring or not, you have to ask why? The Deer Hunter is wonderfully crafted and the acting in this film is without a doubt superb.

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  31. I'm 46 yrs old and just watched this movie for the first time. I agree wth about 95% of this review. I even rewound the movie after they became POWs because I assumed the disc skipped. A lot of unnecessarily long and boring scenes are in this film. I'm a huge movie buff and watched this after years of recommendations from an older coworker who is a bigger movie buff than myself. BTW, my father was in Vietnam and I phoned him shortly after watching this to ask his opinion. Here it is: "It was okay. A little long and not enough action" I imagine this film resonates differently for all Vietnam vets as well as movie buffs. I just didn't feel the character building was sufficient enough to care about these people.

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  32. Great write-up, I am a big believer in commenting on blogs to inform the blog writers know that they’ve added something worthwhile to the world wide web!.. Backcountry hunting

    ReplyDelete
  33. Aside from some minor inaccuracies others here have pointed out, this review is spot-on. The Deer Hunter is a bad movie.

    Anyone who argues that the sprawling first act was some kind of admirable feat of character development needs to go back and document what they actually learn about the characters during that time:

    *SomeOtherGuy is getting married
    *Meryl Streep has an abusive dad
    *These fellas are young and raucous and three are going off to war soon
    *Walken likes trees

    These are the traits of cardboard cutouts, not characters. The first time we start to see any ACTUAL character development in this act is one of the very last scenes, the one where they're standing outside the car, prepping to go hunting. We get a tiny glimpse, beyond the superficial, of who these people are, as John Cazale asks for a spare pair of hunting boots, De Niro refuses, and some conflict plays out...

    Then BAM! SMASH CUT TO VIETNAM!

    It's actually sad to think of how much was wasted in this movie. In skilled hands, it could have been a true epic. It could have paralleled the economic war at home, the struggles of rural/industrial America, with Vietnam. It could have explored how the loss of these young men affected the struggling community during the war. The hardship imposed by the loss of these men and their mental health AFTER the war was superficially hinted at with SomeOtherGuy's wife looking like a bit of an emotional vegetable, but that was it.

    Basically, the only character this movie has is De Niro, and it's hard to root for him because all we know about him is that he's kind of a dick who doesn't like loaning spare hunting boots to his friends.

    ReplyDelete
  34. This is hysterical... I Googled "does anyone else think "The Deer Hunter" sucked and this article popped up. Nice job Ben, this is a well written, considerate, thoughtful, well-organized review. It's also absolutely spot on. I just watched the 1979 Academy Awards segment where Walken picks up an Oscar for this movie... and I love the guy, but really??? P.S. Are you still writing / posting? I hope so. (This article is dated 2011.)

    ReplyDelete
  35. Whoops, I meant to include this: https://youtu.be/wh1jTZXhe7k

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  36. I loved the Himalayas being adjacent to Pennsylvania. Just a short drive in a Caddy from sh!t town PA to the last ice age. In one scene in the mountains someone sends a rock tumbling down the glacier capped peak. I said "OH NO! That's gunna land on Pittsburgh!!"

    ReplyDelete