The Deer Hunter (1978) Review

When sitting down to watch this for the first time, I was thinking it would be one of those films that just haven’t aged that well, and I really didn’t see how there would be a depiction of war that I hadn’t seen before, but there was. Starting off with an hour or so with a group of friends in small town industrial-America, we follow their last days before three of them ship into Vietnam. This really took me by surprise as I thought I was watching a war-film, but there was barely any war-scenes in the film. In a film that is three hours long, it spent less then one of these in Vietnam. At first I was getting a little restless with the slow pace of the film as it felt like literally nothing was happening, but I started noticing there was something slightly off with the dynamic of the friendship and I started noticing how this cloud was hanging over all of them, the fact that soon three of them were going to Vietnam. Despite being tough guys, there was something emotional for all of them, but they were trying to hide. The fact that they all seemed so frightened really helped us to get to know the characters and their relationship better, something that is vital for the film.

Another thing that is truly vital for the film is the acting, and it is phenomenal. De Niro does what he does best, doing a perfect performance of the leader of the group, who is really strong, but really starts to show a more emotional side as the film progresses, but always staying strong. The best performance here is however from Christopher Walken. In the pre-Vietnam scenes he had a really strong screen prescence, however once we got to Vietnam his performance turned into something extraordinary. There is one scene in particular where he just takes complete control over the viewer’s emotions and just crushes them. His scenes get more and more challenging to act and watch, and he executes it all phenomenally.

Giving us the before and after with the characters we get such amazing character development, which was great because I haven’t really seen all of that done this way in a film before. For some reason I did get kind of a Godfather vibe from the film, which is definitely a good thing.

It must be said that the film is very hard to watch. There are several scenes where characters play Russian roulette and they are incredibly uncomfortable to watch. It is a film that left my emotions shattered and not something to watch when you are feeling down. That being said it is brilliant and thought-provoking, with a final scene which did feel kind of out of place, but one that is more fitting the more I think about it. One of the best war films ever made, even though there is only about 20-30 minutes of war in it.

5/5