The Deer Hunter

 I've recently purchased this movie on DVD format at a bargain price. Being a classic, awarded with 5 Oscars, being a success at the box office and favored by the critics, I immediately picked it up. I saw this movie when I was a little kid, but naturally I could not understand much back then. Now that I've seen it again, I can express an opinion from a subjective point of view. The objective one, I'll leave that to the critics.

 First of all, overall, I enjoyed the movie. It is a good movie, but it is surely not a "casual watch" movie, so to speak. It is a long movie, almost achieving the 3 hour mark, and being made in the '70s, it's pace can be tedious at times. The story begins in a little industrial town in USA, a town in which it's population belongs to a Russian-American community. The first hour or so of the movie focuses on a wedding that also serves as a background for character development. The pacing in the first hour is slow, can become boring, making you to loose interest, and for me the wedding didn't seem interesting at all, but that may be for the fact that I'm from Romania, so I'm quite used to those specific wedding celebrations. Anyway, after the wedding is over and after some scenes in which we see the main characters partaking in a deer hunting activity, the editing cuts right into the middle of the Vietnam war and this is were things take an interesting turn. From here on I really enjoyed every little bit of it. The drama is terrific, the acting is superb, everything is done well. This is not a war movie, wee don't see divisions, hundreds of soldiers, tactical and strategic operations. No. It just uses the war as a tool for creating powerful psychological trauma on the characters, specifically on Michael (Robert de Niro), Nick (Cristopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage), but more on Nick. The ending is powerful and sad, and this is all I'm gonna say. I know that it has been said thousands of times before, but the movie showcases very well on how can a war affect not only those who participated in it, but an entire town and the ones that they love. In the end it is a great movie, not a masterpiece, it has flaws, mainly in the editing department. A lengthy movie with a slow pace right at the beginning can be a turn off. Just bare through the wedding parts and some other parts here and there and it will be a rewarding experience.

 Oh, one of the very first movies in which Meryl Streep appears, so that's cool. Oh, and on IMDB, the trivia says that Meryl Streep improvised many of her lines. So cool.

Go watch it if you haven't seen it yet!