YMMV / The Deer Hunter

• Award Snub: Getting nominated for 9 Oscars and winning 5, including Best Picture, was a nice payoff for the untested Oscar Bait strategy used to campaign for the film. Among the four losses, Robert De Niro had already won an Oscar, Meryl Streep would go on to win three, and Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography had the misfortune of going up against the celebrated work of Nestor Almendros in Days of Heaven. But you can legitimately debate the loss in Original Screenplay to Coming Home, though, as Michael Cimino biographer Charles Elton noted, a win would've made for a super-awkward acceptance speech, since the four nominated writers, who were all at the ceremony, weren't on very good terms with one another.^Explanation Cimino and his writing partner Deric Washburn had a messy We Used to Be Friends breakup, then Washburn successfully wrangled the screenplay credit away from Cimino. Meanwhile, Louis Garfinkle and Quinn Redeker, the writers of the initial screenplay that Cimino and Washburn overhauled, had almost nothing to do with the finished film and didn't really know the others anyway.
• Awesome Music: In addition to the guys singing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", there's also Cavatina.
• Broken Base: The wedding day. Many jokes have been made about it being far too slow and stalling us from seeing the Vietnam drama with far less interesting content. However, there are fans who will quickly defend it noting that it does an excellent job establishing the characters and making us like them, which is what makes the rest of the movie so powerful when we see how the war impacted and changed all of them.
• Complete Monster: The "guard in charge" of the Viet Cong Po W Camp serves as the ultimate representation of evil in The Vietnam War. Torturing and abusing the prisoners in his care, the guard in charge orders the prisoners to play a sadistic game of Russian Roulette for the entertainment of himself and his men. The prisoners are beaten and forced to play the twisted game until they die one by one, and any who refuse to play are locked inside a "pit" submerged in a rushing river to be slowly tired out and drown. Dozens of men die between the pit and the roulette, and the guard in charge oversees this horror for nothing but the amusement of gambling.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: The movie's small but dedicated fandom is way more attached to Mike/Nick than to official couples Mike/Linda or Nick/Linda.
• He Really Can Act: A retroactive example. Not that he hasn't been acclaimed afterwards, but Christopher Walken's talent has often been overshadowed by his oddness as both a person and a performer. His work here though is noted to be exempt from the many eccentricities of his later projects and widely regarded as the greatest acting, he's ever done, winning him a well-deserved Academy Award.
• Harsher in Hindsight: John Cazale was diagnosed with terminal cancer just as filming was about to begin; this makes his presence at the funeral scene all the more morbid.
• Ho Yay: Mike and Nick, big time. The movie's small but dedicated fandom in Tumblr and Archive of Our Own revolves almost entirely around the Mike/Nick ship for a few reasons, such as:
  • Mike telling Nick he's the only one he can really stand when they go hunting.
  • Nick making Mike promise to bring his body back if he dies in Vietnam, right after chasing a drunk Mike running through the streets of Clairton stark naked.
  • Mike pulling Nick up to the rescue helicopter instead of himself or Stevie, who's actually the most injured out of the three.
  • Mike returning to Vietnam for the sole purpose of finding Nick and bringing him home, and declaring his love for him multiple times even if Nick doesn't recognize him, including right before trying his luck with the gun in their crucial last Russian Roulette match.
  • In short, they're both just as devoted to each other as they are to Linda.
• Memetic Mutation: "Mau! Ði đi mau!"
  What part of "di di mau" don't you understand?
  • Axel's "Fuckin' A!" is probably one of the biggest Memetic Mutations of them all, however. Odd trivia note: in the early drafts the line was "For sure!".
  • Overly long sequences in films are sometimes said to be "longer than the wedding scene in The Deer Hunter", that's how well-known the drawn-out wedding is.
• Misaimed Fandom: More than a few people have played Russian Roulette in imitation of the film and paid for it with their lives.
• My Real Daddy: As mentioned in Mid-Development Genre Shift on the Trivia tab, the final film ultimately descended from an unproduced screenplay about Russian Roulette called The Man Who Came to Play. Michael Cimino and playwright Deric Washburn came up with an entirely new storyline and set of characters, then Washburn completed a first draft while Cimino scouted locations. Afterwards, Cimino revised Washburn's screenplay before filming. But when Washburn watched a preview of the film and saw Cimino get sole writing credit, he appealed to the Writer's Guild, and despite protests from Cimino, they ultimately awarded Washburn the writing credit, along with story credits for Washburn, Cimino, and the writers of The Man Who Came to Play (Louis Garfinkle and Quinn Redeker), with the fact that Cimino already had directorial and producer credits apparently playing a role in denying him screenplay credit. Cimino biographer Charles Elton feels that Cimino's rewrites were substantial and important enough that he should've shared screenplay credit with Washburn.
• Nightmare Fuel: The Russian Roulette scenes are made of this.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: Its Best Picture win enabled the film to rise above a lot of it, but during awards season there were several concurrent controversies over it, mostly stemming from its portrayal of The Vietnam War, with political commentators generally accusing of it being propaganda for the opposite viewpoint on the war than whatever their side believed. The Artistic License use of Russian Roulette as a plot point also stirred up lots of debate. Jane Fonda spoke out against its alleged "Pentagon view" of the war, while admitting that she hadn't seen it (and, of course, she was in its awards season rival Coming Home). On top of all that, Michael Cimino rather foolishly lied about some of his personal background in an interview, particularly claiming to have served in Vietnam as a Green Beret medic (he actually served in the Army reserve briefly before the war even began), and people who didn't like the film seized on it as well.
• Retroactive Recognition: The song that plays during the wedding reception sequence, just before the drinking ritual, would go on to become the Tetris theme just over a decade later.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The opening scene at the wedding is extremely long and torturous, taking up almost the entire first hour, but once the war actually happens things really start to get interesting.
• The Woobie: The main cast qualifies, but especially Nick.

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