The Deer Hunter

... Perhaps a little cumbersome, but it’s hard not to get caught up in the film’s big, sentimental sweep.

So many of the elements are so good that it all adds up to a pity. Someone, or more than one -- writer or producers or director or editor or all -- fogged up about why this picture was being made and whether it was on the rails.

A film to be debated and argued over seriously because it is an earnest, serious and impressive work, despite the reservations it is necessary to have about it. In a thin and evasive year, The Deer Hunter joins a thin company that aspire to greatness.

The Deer Hunter might have been a superb document of the devastation to human lives caused by the Vietnam war... But director Michael Cimino allows the story to drag on past three hours, with endless scenes of male camaraderie and war atrocity.

Far from achieving Tolstoyan heights, however, Cimino fails even to attain a Scorsesian or Coppolian level. The structure of the film is so rickety, and the details so incongruous, that whatever feelings were intended finally peter out.

The combat scenes are painfully graphic and, while it concludes on a hopeful note, The Deer Hunter remains an emotional thunderbolt which is apt to send you out of the Opera House Cinema in a state of profound cinematic shell shock.

There’s something elemental about the movie’s boys’ adventure machismo, a primal force that overpowers Cimino’s more cartoonish flourishes.

Michael Cimino’s tale about the physical, emotional, and psychological impacts the Vietnam War had on a group of friends remains one of film's ultimate masterpieces. Very few movies have ever captured the unsparing aftermath of war quite as devastatingly.

It grabs you by the lapel and says, "Call me masterpiece!"... These weaknesses are The Deer Hunter's greatest strength -- because, in a year of timid moviemaking, they trumpet the film's daring to fail at being great.

Graphic in its depictions of war and peace, honest in its capturing of human emotion, Deer Hunter is an epic that avoids political points to stress the basic needs we all share.