Film Analysis: The Deer Hunter

The Deer Hunter
The Deer Hunter film is about factory workers from the state of Pennsylvania became soldier in the Vietnam War. The movie was so popular that it won an Oscar in the late 70’s. The films setting in the beginning is the location of Pennsylvania, and this is where the story began for the workers in the movie. In this part of the film viewers got to the story of the workers and their situation change as they get drafted into the Vietnam.
The actual part of this film involving war was mostly short because the movie didn’t really focus on war but the character’s themselves and how they lived. In the film you learned that they was captured, terrorized, and how that survived in Saigon. Then story mainly goes back to Pennsylvania telling the story of one the character’s in the film. As the film comes to closing you see that one of the characters return to Vietnam looking for his lost friend of war, and he find him only to later watch him die by playing a game of roulette. The film received much criticism as many believed that this film was anti- American and that it portrayed Americans as weak so to say.

There is a part in the movie that people had a hard time dealing with and was question the director as to why he had chosen to show roulette in this movie among American soldiers at war time.

Showing that the soldiers survive the game at the POW camp in the movie but only one of them to be killed in the end. This scene was very controversial to many viewers and received a lot of backlash because it didn’t show the American’s triumph in the movie. Michael Cimino , the film’s director stated the he heard about those games being played. These events that where showed in this film has not been validated that the portrayed events are real or even have merit. This movie wasn’t a war picture even though some of the scenes dealt with war. Little parts such as the camps, small battles, but not actual war

life.
The Deer Hunter is a good movie and if you could actually understand the director’s intent of the film you would see that it isn’t about war. I the showed us how soldiers sometimes deal with issues in a different way and brothers of war sometimes band together. You get to feel the emotions of the character’s love for each other and feel their pain with their own struggles. This film could be called a soldier return if you asked me because it mostly shows the effects of people after war and how challenging it is to make it back home after experiences certain horrors of war. The little part in the movie about war, you saw how it was for them in battle against the Viet Cong. The actions was high paced and the images that the director shot showed how violent war could be. You learn about the environment in which that had overcome along with fighting. The where imprisoned, forced to play Russian roulette, and mentally tortured. In the roulette scene, you could actually see the emotion of the characters as the gun clicks, and this built suspense alone with controversy.
The scene gave viewers the power to visualize had thing could have been in the war and how badly that a person could be effected form those exposures. Images can linger in a person mind for a long amount of time and depending on how real those images are they contribute to negative actions in a person. This film showed a lot about that and that is the actual theme of this film. The director angles and shot selection captured all that emotion so the viewer at the end could realized the point of this film.