Editor Reviews:

Description:
Winner of 5 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Cimino) and Best Supporting Actor (Christopher Walken), this critically acclaimed, extraordinarily powerful film tracks a group of steelworker pals from a Pennsylvania blast furnace to the cool hunting grounds of the Alleghenies to the lethal cauldron of Vietnam. Robert De Niro gives an outstanding performance as Michael, the natural leader of the group. The Deer Hunter is a searing drama of friendship and courage - and what happens to these qualities under hardship. It is a shattering emotional experience you will never forget.

Amazon.com:
Winner of five Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, The Deer Hunter is simultaneously an audacious directorial conceit and one of the greatest films ever made about friendship and the personal impact of war. Like Apocalypse Now, it's hardly a conventional battle film--the soldier's experience was handled with greater authenticity in Platoon--but its depiction of war on an intimate scale packs a devastatingly dramatic punch. Director Michael Cimino may be manipulating our emotions with masterful skill, but he does it in a way that stirs the soul and pinches our collective nerves with graphic, high-intensity scenes of men under life-threatening duress. Although Russian-roulette gambling games were not a common occurrence during the Vietnam war, they're used here as a metaphor for the futility of the war itself. To the viewer, they become unforgettably intense rites of passage for the best friends--Pennsylvania steelworkers played by Robert De Niro, John Savage, and Oscar winner Christopher Walken--who may survive or perish during their tour through a tropical landscape of hell. Back home, their loved ones must cope with the war's domestic impact, and in doing so they allow The Deer Hunter to achieve a rare combination of epic storytelling and intimate, heart-rending drama. --Jeff Shannon

Rating : - Very Powerful, Emotionally Gripping But Too Bad About the DVD!
What introduced me to this film was actually John Williams' performance and arrangement of Stanley Myers' "Cavatina" a tune which I really like and had wanted to learn how to play for years. I first got the soundtrack to the film which was pretty good albeit short at barely over half an hour in length. After I had learned and committed "Cavatina" to memory, I decided to give the film a chance too.

Typical of 70s movies of the time, directors were given a lot more leeway to execute their art which is why many of the best films come from the late 60s up to the late 70s. I think it's safe to say that "Deer Hunter" would never have been made today. By today's standards the film moves along at a glacial pace and the 3 hour run time would probably be too much to ask today's audience to endure. For the patient however, this movie does reward repeated viewing and is powerful in its anti-war theme and how the innocents are the soldiers fighting in wars not of their creation. Although the russian roulette scenes are central to the story, they are probably not historically correct and yet they are a metaphor for the innocent soldier who is asked to commit suicide to fight somebody else's war. The first hour drags along and takes its time to show the innocence of life in a steel town in Philadelphia and how a group of workers who are fairly religious and patriotic handle the transition of their former lives to their Vietnam experiences and how their harrowing experiences have changed them relative to their friends that stayed behind. The acting is first class and Walken thoroughly deserved his Oscar and De Niro should have gotten one himself.

The problem lies with this version of the dvd which is very poor. The picture quality hasn't been restored and so imperfections such as white and other spots abound in practically every frame and the overall quality barely matches that of VHS. The widescreen format is not anamorphic and so actually only about half of your plasma tv screen is utilised. The sound comes in Dolby 2.0 stereo but if you have a Pro Logic setup, you can similate a 5.1 surround sound effect. There are no special features worth mentioning either.

If you are a patient movie-lover who views film as an artform you will enjoy this film that rewards repeated viewing like most classics do however you should get a better dvd version which has a much better restored and remastered picture and sound quality with at least 5.1 surround sound options. You should wait for this in either a standard version or preferably in Blu-ray to do any justice to this classic and to give this particular dvd version a miss.