Nick is admitted to a hospital and is suffering from major psychological and physical trauma. Soon Nick is rescued by the aircraft crew, but Steven and Mike get stranded. They kill their captors and starting floating on a tree trunk after helping Steven escape.
Mike and Nick devise a plan to save Steven and escape the Viet Cong.
This cage is then thrown into a river full of dead bodies. They are forced to participate in a game of Russian Roulette and Steven ends up being thrown into a cage. While in Vietnam, Nick, Mike, and Steven are captured by the Viet Cong.
Mike and Nick both love Linda, but Linda ends up accepting Nick’s proposal.Īlso read | The Lie Ending Explained: What Happens To Kayla And Her Family In The End?īefore leaving for Vietnam, Nick and Mike go on a final deer hunt. Before leaving for Vietnam, Steven gets engaged to Angela, but she is pregnant with another man’s child. Before leaving for the tour, the three friends – Mike (Robert De Niro), Steven (John Savage), and Nick (Christopher Walken). And it is a deadly game of chance that is played, ultimately, by people who exchange money as bets on human lives, much like the powers that control wars.The Deer Hunter is a film that focuses on the life of three friends who are soon leaving to serve in the military and their posting is in Vietnam. The Russian Roulette isn't Russian, but its name makes us think of Russia. The point here is that these were hapless, working class Americans from all backgrounds who were sent to this futile war to fight and suffer and die for the benefit of larger powers involved in an ideological and global economic/political struggle. He doesn't answer until the doctor asks him if his name is Russian. The doctor calls him by the Russian name on his record. He is "shell shocked" and clearly suffering from survivor's guilt having been rescued by the helicopter while his two friends fell back into the river. In one scene, Nick is sitting on a balcony in a hospital in Saigon when a doctor comes to verify his identity. The irony is that the men who go to the war are Americans, but they happen to be of Russian descent. The Vietnam conflict was a pointless war that the US didn't win, and it was played out within the context of the larger Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union (with China also a player). I think that it also ties in with a larger theme in the film, one that was not necessarily intended by the filmmakers.
One can only guess - the likely camaraderie of steel workers, the small town environment where people grow up together into adulthood, the gritty color/non-color of steel factory backdrop which foreshadows the war setting, the Russian Orthodox religious connection. (Nolan) I have yet to find an interview indicating why the director Michael Cimini or the screenwriter Deric Washburn chose the Pennsylvania steel town to begin with. This was combined with ideas from the plot of The Best Years of Their Lives, which chronicles the lives of three veterans returning from WWII to smalltown middle America. To Play which was set in Las Vegas ( Wikipedia).
The original idea for the movie came from a script called The Men Who Came It was probably chosen, as you suggest, partly because of its prevalence in the West Pennsylvania steel towns and partly because it is so heavily ritualistic and ritual is a theme of the movie - a Wedding, the dances at the Wedding party, hunting trips, men drinking together after work, a funeral, people gathered to gamble, the brutal rituals of war. There is no evidence that Russian Roulette had its origins in Russia, so that seems a superficial connection.