And it doesn't disappoint. Godawful nonsensical shots that make you aware there is a camera, it's the physical equivalent of Cimino grabbing you by the hair and forcing you to look at what he wants, in other words, New Wave Hollywood at its worst, terrible performances, and it tries so hard to be impressionistic and yet I've never seen a film that feels more fake than this.
shareIt is terrible. I first saw it as a kid and thought that maybe parts of it went over my head. So I watched it again last year and it is just terrible.
* A bunch of guys join the army and are then sent to Vietnam. No training? No note if there was any time jump?
* The Russian roulette games are hilarious as well.
It is just badly done throughout.
Do they have to show boot camp? Anyone watching the movie would know they went to boot camp. It's not important.
shareThey don't have to show it but the way the film looks it's like they have been in country a while but there isn't anything in between to link Stateside and being at war. For a film that spent a lot of time on a boring wedding and runs for 3 hours it makes you wonder why they were so sloppy with the continuity in this regard.
shareI can see that. I think Cimino wanted to juxtapose normal life with the brutality of war by going straight from one to the other. They could have made a side comment about finishing boot camp x amount of weeks ago, I suppose.
shareThat's precisely the point.
Just like the Chinese Christian mission in John Ford’s '7 Women' or Chinatown in Polanski’s film of the same name, Vietnam in 'The Deer Hunter' is the nexus of all repressed negative impulses and drives (fears, racism, rape, death, etc.). Hell as “the impossibility of reason” as Chris says in 'Platoon'.
Vietnam in 'The Deer Hunter' is represented as the ultimate experience of chaos, a quasi-hallucinatory mental space, rather than an actual physical place that you can get to by physical means. It is an 'island' you can only reach via an abrupt single cut.
Twice in the film, we are transported to Vietnam in a single cut (no elliptic montage of the protagonists preparing to leave, talking the plane or what-have-you).
Both Vietnam sequences start with fire (the helicopter rockets and the Vietcong flame thrower in the first, the archive footage of a fire during the American embassy riots in the second) and when DeNiro returns to get Nick he is literally in Hell (he crosses a river which might as well be the Styx, and passes by legions of damned fleeing Hanoi in the midst of flames).
It is likewise no accident that the whole Russian roulette Vietnam episode takes place in a stilt cabin over a river: the place is a metaphoric and physical "island". The Deer Hunter gives an impressionistic vision of Vietnam as hell: it is concerned with the psychological rather than the political reality of war.
All of Cimino's films seem like they are filtered through the vision of someone who has a totally alien viewpoint of life as opposed to most people. Everything happening in the films just seems very unrealistic and forced. Of all the Cimino movies I have seen, his first effort, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, is the only one that doesn't have this weird unreal mood. It got worse and worse as his career went along. Deerhunter and Heaven's Gate had moods that were not like any war or western drama anyone ever made before or since, and not in a good way. Year of the Dragon and Desperate Hours both were really strange crime movies.
My personal guess is that Cimino was living with Asperger's Syndrome and when we watch a Cimino movie, we are seeing a representation of how the world looks to someone who has Asperger's. Maybe he just didn't really 'get' the way most people think and react and his movies were his version of reality.
they are so terrible, like when he shoots two minutes of Christopher Walken walking back and forth in the most idiotic way at the wedding, what the hell is that? he wants to make his films realistic and impressionistic but literally none of his characters behave in any realistic way whatsoever. The films are overall terrible in every way, and it's very sad how the same loud and vocal majority of cinephile dudebros like Scott Weinberg now want to champion him as a great director.
shareyou crazy
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