Watched Criterion Bluray- Love the film now!

I'm a pretty big cinephile. I actually read Final Cut before viewing the film (several years actually). I'd seen the Trio documentary based on final cut. Then I viewed the film for the first time on standard dvd. I couldn't understand a single thing. The sound was so bad and the picture was awfully muddy. I watched it again about a year later. I understood it a bit better but still it was impossible to penetrate emotionally.
But tonight, I watched Criterions bluray with proper sound and picture with subtitles. My god, it completely changed my view of the film. Initially i couldn't understand the seemingly endless random scenes of crowds. None of the metaphors however made sense until today. The entire film is centered around the metaphors of people circling each other, mostly clashing groups. From then i realized all of the sequences in the film are pretty much about how the masses control the individual. OK, not an entirely new notion but suddenly it all came into focus. Cimino isn't a fool. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter may seem like straightforward films at first, but Cimino is in fact a poet and his obsession is American masculinity. Not only does each scene tell a fairly straight forward story, it secretly holds many poetic images, lines of dialogue, and a greater symbolic meaning. This, as many writers will attest, is quite a difficult feat.
So anyway, I now have a greater understanding and respect for this film.
And Vilmos Zsigmonds cinematography is stunning. Each frame is a wonderful oil painting.