Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com essential video:
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

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 : - Spin the Revolver
What can we say about this unusual character study of small town men and women from Pennsylvania who are faced with a paradox of two worlds. One at home and the other a world away. The accent is not so much on Vietnam, but on psychological effects of growing up in America with all of the traditions and life that we had all come to know in the late 1960s, and the aftermath of experience in a violent, war torn country on the other side of the world.
Each character handles that experience differently, but all are profoundly affected by the practices and atrocities committed to them during a short period of captivity. This is the consistent theme of the movie and the sharing and commitment of brotherly love.
The movie garnered top honors, and deserved just about everything it received. But perhaps the secret of this picture is that you cannot walk away from it without being affected by it in some manner. In the end, you share in the loss, because the depth of character study is so deep.
This movie is not suitable for young viewers. But it is perhaps very important to be seen as an adult. Never in the field of psychological study has a picture so effectively dramatized post traumatic stress disorder in this fashion.
The details can be discovered among the hundreds of other reviewers here as to the how and why. I cast this review for the purpose that in the many films recommended that you see during your life if possible, this is certainly one of them.