[undercoverbrother]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

Holy crap I just realized The Deer Hunter isn't on that list.

What the hell?

you sure......

Spoiler!

7. The Deer Hunter


Writer-director Michael Cimino had but one feature under his belt – the spirited caper movie Thunderbolt and Lightfoot – before he found himself at the helm of the first epic studio movie directly about the lately concluded Vietnam war that had traumatised his country. Taking a leaf from Coppola's Godfather, Cimino opens his story slowly, with an extended working-class Russian-Orthodox wedding sequence in the three lead characters' Pennsylvania mining hometown, followed by a hunting trip to the nearby mountains.
He then plunges us directly – that is, in a single, brutal cut – into the flaming maelstrom of the war itself. Michael, Steven and Nick (Robert De Niro, John Savage and an epicene young Christopher Walken, respectively) find themselves trapped and captured after a vicious firefight, and forced by their Vietcong captors to play a nightmare version of Russian roulette. They manage to escape, though only Michael and Steven find their way back to the US. More or less destroyed inside, they find no place for themselves or their experiences at home and Michael returns to Saigon to rescue Nick. The Russian roulette aspect was widely criticised, and almost certainly never happened but, as a metaphor for America's suicidal intervention in south-east Asia, it cannot be beaten. JP