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By
NICK ZEGARAC
"The Deer Hunter" is one of those films that, once seen, will linger in the recesses of your mind forever. It's a powerful, painful reminder of the Vietnam fiasco that doomed American POW's to a haunted hell of torture and torment with ultimately no vindication in a homecoming for their suffrage.
Robert De Niro is Michael -- a stoic loner whose home fires burn for Linda (Meryl Streep), the girl of his best friend, Nick (Christopher Walken). But when the boys are drafted into the Vietnam War, they leave their small mining town to serve their country. After a lengthy wedding scene (which frankly, is too long) between Steven (John Savage) and Angela (Rutanya Alda) the boys, including Steven ship off to war. They are captured, tortured and forced to play a demented game of Russian roulette. Nick loses his mind, abandons all hope of returning home and eventually kills himself in a game of roulette for profit. Steven's legs are so badly bitten through by rats that they have to be amputated to save his life, with the net result of permanent emotional scars destroying any chance for his happiness with Angela. Only Michael emerges relatively unscathed by his experience -- still stoic and alone and in search of some sort of personal satisfaction, that seemingly will never come to him. The film, an American classic, pulls no punches in presenting the grim, hard reality of life during and after the Vietnam War. It deserves far better treatment than what it current has been given on DVD.
The transfer from Universal is terribly flawed. Not even anamorphically enhanced for widescreen televisions, the 2:35:1 picture is marred by digital artifacts, tiling, edge enhancement, pixelization, aliasing and a terribly rendered color scale that is unbalanced and, in spots, terribly faded. Colors bleed and are muddy. Film and digital grain are way too excessive. Shadow and contrast levels are poor. Blacks are not solid or deep.
There's really nothing to recommend this visual presentation. The audio is remastered but very strained in both its bass and high end levels. Finally, there are no extra features. Don't waste your money. |
