When making a movie based on historical facts Hollywood has the right to use artistic license to develop an interesting story. Hollywood also has the responsibility to keep artistic license within some parameters of truth. In the Deer Hunter they went too far depicting Russian roulette as a commonplace Vietnamese blood sport to capitalize on the hatred of all things military that had been building since the mid-1960s.
Relied on Visceral Images
The first hour of this three hour marathon was sedate, boring really, compared to the action in the remaining two hours. Without prelude, three friends from Pennsylvania (Michael, Vick, and Steven) are in Viet Nam, taken prisoner, and playing each other in a forced game of Russian roulette. The movie spent almost no time developing the characters. It was strong on images and short on dialog. The Deer Hunter relied on morbid voyeurism to titillate the audience without delivering any real substance on the war or its participants.
Character Development Lacking
The audience is allowed to watch the action but wasn’t really a part of what is happening. In a typical movie the audience develops a bond and experiences events through the eyes of one central character or group of characters. With no strong ties to the characters the tragedy befallen each fails to be overly moving. If Michael, Vick, and Steven had been replaced by three new characters for the scenes in Viet Nam it wouldn’t have affected how the audience felt about the events.
Irresponsible Artistic License
This movie shares nothing with the war in Viet Nam except for the time frame and setting. In every other respect it is a work of pure fantasy. The Viet Nam backdrop capitalizes on the open emotional wounds still prevalent in the United States in the late 1970s. If the message of The Deer Hunter was meant to tell us war is bad it could have easily done so, as hundreds of other films have, without resorting to total fabrication of historical events to oversell its point. Even if the Russian roulette theme is meant as a metaphor that war is a waste of life, it is presented in such a way to suggest this is actually what happened during the war in Viet Nam. There is no historical evidence to suggest POWs or civilians played Russian roulette for sport.
Other war movies that have taken artistic license pass the test of time; Casablanca, Platoon, Patton, and Saving Private Ryan to name a few. Revisiting The Deer Hunter, it comes off as tired, dated, anti-war propaganda that fed off the emotions of the moment for its success.
Bradley Allen Ritzenthaler - Brad Ritzenthaler
