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Simply A Masterpiece

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Wyoming, 1890. Frank Averill is the Sherriff of Johnson County, a county largely inhabited by foreign immigrants. The wealthy cattle owners view the immigrant farmers as a nuisance and hindrance to them enlarging their own land. The cattlemen's association, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, effectively declares war on the immigrant farmers, and gets the state government's blessing. They assemble an army of guns-for-hire, and, backed by US cavalry, set out to rid the state of the immigrants. Frank Averill's heart is with the immigrants but he is not sure they have a chance of winning the inevitable war.Loosely based on true events and written and directed by Michael Cimino, whose previous movie was The Deer Hunter, the movie had heaps of potential. A noble sentiment, highlighting the rights of the downtrodden, with the promise of some good action scenes - what could go wrong? Well, a lot. The movie is one of the most padded in history. The story could easily have been told in two hours, even less, but Cimino stretches it out to more than 3½ hours. Heaps of scenes that don't add much, if anything, and many scenes that go too long. The opening scenes, set at Harvard University, say it all - all they are there for is to show the friendship between James Averill and Billy Irvine, and this relationship has very little bearing on the story, ultimately! All the Harvard scenes, taking about 20 minutes, could have been removed and the movie would have been no worse for it. It gets worse - Cimino also made a 5½ version of the movie!In between all the padding, there is some good plot development, but this is often a false dawn. Just when something significant happens and you think the movie is about to click into top gear, you then have 20-30 minutes of stagnation and dullness - more padding.Eventually things do come together, but it takes more than three hours to get there. Even then the conclusion is a bit anti-climactic and not entirely satisfying.Okayish performance by Kris Kristofferson in the lead role - could have done without his excessive mumbling though. Best performances goes to Christopher Walken and Jeff Bridges. John Hurt and Sam Waterston are okay in their roles, though Hurt overdoes the drunkenness aspect of his character. On the downside, Isabelle Huppert is atrocious as Ella and Richard Masur as the station-master, Cully, is not much better.The movie also includes Mickey Rourke in a minor role - it was only his third movie. Willem Dafoe made his movie debut in Heaven's Gate, in an uncredited role.More interesting than the movie itself is the infamy and history surrounding it. Cimino was fresh from the success of The Deer Hunter, so had a large amount of free rein with production. The length of the movie (especially the fact that there is a 5½ hour version out there) will tell you that production was not cheap - Cimino eventually went four times over budget! The film was one of the worst box office bombs of all time, generating $3.5m in revenue in the US after costing $44m to make (in 1980 terms). The losses on the movie effectively bankrupted United Artists - they were sold and the name disappeared. After Cimino's free-spending, studios were loathe to give directors free rein anymore, starting a period of tighter corporate control of movies. The movie also put westerns on the outer with audiences and studios, making the 80s a lean period for westerns. It also effectively ended the career of Michael Cimino. His next movie was Year of the Dragon, released five years later and which wasn't that great. Since 1985 he has only directed three movies, none of which were any good. Nobody is willing to risk him with a potentially-A-grade movie.Worth watching just to see what all the fuss is about but, beware, it's a bit of an ordeal.

Review summary is based mostly on movie's last scenes - on ship. I think that it had strong message. Now, I write my first review in renewed IMDB review submit form - what made some troubles with Firefox policy. I don't like new way of walking thru reviews too. Just my 2 cents :-) Heaven's Gate is not great movie, it has serious flaws, and is hard to watch most of time. I purchased BlueRay couple years ago, and managed to watch it until end only yesterday. First - it is too long, there are some way too long, stretched scenes. Then, the characters, their actions, motivations, dialogues - some forced Wild West 'heroes' - at wrong place. Main character talks very little. But that was just absurd that he did not say anything in very crucial situations. Why they just did not kill that main villain in black before battle - that could be main question. Ah, this is some kind of Western movie. I expected some social, historical movie rather. What is good is camera - spectacular most of time, the sets, costumes ... Shortly, the substance. Acting is fine too, but not great. I think that Cimino simply lost his sense after great success of D.H. . I still rate this 7, despite serious flaws. It has message, although not well presented. The title - I guess that everyone got it's double meaning. But that could be presented better in movie self.

Heaven's Gate is an epic vision by Filmmaker Michael Cimino. Whether you like it or not, it's Cimino's story that he wanted to tell. The end result was a box office cancer with several finished versions that bankrupted a studio and ruined the career of many in the entertainment industry. However, we are left with a movie that Cimino continues to have critics pan and praise with its countless highs and lows. Here are my 7 ways that could have saved Heaven's Gate from what is utterly became. 1. Stopping Cimino throughout the production. The Studio had several opportunities to save money and time by not allowing Cimino to go over budget several times and going over schedule multiple times. The excessive demand in production value and countless spending could have been halted if not minimized if you reigned Cimino in on multiple occasions. Filmed mostly in Montana, scenes were also shot at Oxford. However, filming in Newport, Rhode Island for less than a 5 minute scenes could have been completely scrapped. This also would have saved money and time for the sake of the Director's vision. Whether the final product would have been drastically different, the Studio would not have faced as such a giant disaster. 2. More back story. The movie is an epic drag when it comes to the subject matter and its overall plot. Giving a narration, subtitles for the non speaking English characters along with more backstory about the immigrants could have given this beautiful film a more "understandable" story to help the audience from hating it. The confusion the audience strives is that the long-winded sequences lack the direction of story. 3. Scrapping your minor characters. If the goal is to produce and epic five hour movie, then you need to keep your characters. However, if you wanted a better story without losing site of the main story you would need to cut back on the side stories from actors like John Hurt, Jeff Bridges, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Masur and Mickey Rourke. This would have helped cut the final length of the movie and improved the central story line. 4. More romance. The story does lack a connection between the three main characters: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert. Several critics have complained that the love interest between this romantic triangle could have greatly been bettered. 5. Edits, edits and more edits. Heaven's Gate has moments of pure beauty and epic scenes. How it is edited into a movie creates a long melodramatic story that baffles and goes nowhere. Although Heaven's Gate did have several final edited versions, the idea of a total re- edit, from its opening credits, to including flashbacks and rearranging scenes by manipulating the time sequence could have helped with the pacing of the movie. 6. Make Heaven's Gate into a 2 part movie if not a Trilogy. If the Studio made their single box office bomb into a 3 part epic, they had the chance of recouping their investment and keeping Cimino's vision of a 5 1/2 hour story. Along with option #5, editing the movie into 3 parts would have given the audience more time to digest the story and the vision that Cimino wanted to tell.

Just as this was panned in 1980, the pendulum has now swung back and a sympathy campaign has sprouted up to defend Heaven's Gate as a misunderstood masterpiece victimized by a conspiratorial press. However those critics were correct. Given the carte blanche for director Michael Cimino; the talents of cast and crew; the endless extensions and concessions from United Artists; the altruistic intentions and ambitions for the project that Cimino shepherded for almost 10 years… Heaven's Gate is a terrible movie and is the worst movie I've ever seen or will see. It's easy to list low budget films when ranking the worst of the worst, but when director Ed Wood makes a movie with community theater level talent over a weekend on a four figure budget, I expect a clunker. At least Ed Wood achieved the basic goal of telling a story, albeit a simple one. Characters are introduced, the plot set up, and the story proceeds. Cimino's gross incompetence undermined even those simple aspirations here because the extravagance of the production buries any attempt at meaning, and the rest of the movie collapses in on itself. To start, the casting is decidedly off. Kristofferson is wooden and incapable of carrying any epic. Huppert might be right for another script, but ultimately here she doesn't fit. Other likable actors are reduced to caricatured roles that are both underwritten or poorly written. Next the infamous prologue: I understand the idealism of the prologue is intended to contrast the disappointments of the real world, but I can't imagine a worse start to a movie than a long march into a graduation ceremony which takes its sweet time delivering dull speeches by dull characters that immediately require audience caffeination. Are we really supposed to buy Kristofferson and Hurt as college age? Why is Hurt wearing a ridiculous Little Lord Fauntleroy wig? The dance scene that follows is well made but unnecessary. I got the circular motif that was being repeated, but going to such lengths to achieve student film pretension is pure folly. Then there's a fight that's also pointless but thrown in. Mind you, the prologue is a solid 20 minutes and we barely know who these characters are and sitting through such lengthy scenes watching characters we know nothing about is torturous.When we finally endure the horrid prologue to finally meet the central character and setting, all the dialogue explaining the conflict is muffled behind train noises, animal calls, and wagons racing through the street. (side note: MC fills the streets of the tiny town with chaotic traffic that makes the Indianapolis 500 look like sublime).There are several sloppy, amateurish overdubs of key information. It's barely known who is talking, or who he's talking to and why. What dialogue is heard is frequently unimaginative and awful: the comically corny "death list" is bandied up as often as possible. Other clunkers include: "God you're beautiful." -- "So are you." and "Oh Ella. Don't die." Those aren't throw away lines, they are the only dialogue used to express the emotions for entire sequences. While the scenery is certainly majestic and the photography occasionally beautiful, the overall sepia tone that dominates the 4 hour slog is another miscalculation. Randomly a few shots appear almost orange before reverting back to sepia. Dust storms that otherwise would signal judgment day blow in and obscure everything, including the story. Cimino falls in love with the mountains and dirt so much he seems to feel like the story is an annoying distraction. A wide shot of the mountains is fine in moderation, but Cimino shoehorns shots like these nonstop for 4 hours, and they lose all effect. After the indulgence of the prologue and the incompetent audio that follows, the first meaningful audible dialogue took place at about the 40 minute mark when the cattle association first bring up the "death list" (gasp!). Somehow the next 2 hours is wasted on pointless scenes of waiting for the henchmen to enforce the death list. Having the wolf trapper grab Mickey Rourke's tongue is a bizarre waste of time. Unfortunately there's a rape scene that's drawn out and relatively graphic but again is unnecessary.If you make it to the climax, you'll be treated/subjected to such bizarre happenings that you may burst into laughter. Huppert transforms into Joan of Arc and leads the battle charge; the revolting peasants can't bother with strategy and ride in circles (yes I get it) around the trapped mercenaries; Bridges' character repeats lines like "Get out of the way!" and "Take cover!"; when the opposing sides recouperate at night, the peasants build Roman inspired rolling walls in a few hours by hand; the pharmacist gathers enough supplies to build hundreds of sticks of dynamite. Next the laughable conclusions: one peasant sits under a slowly oncoming wagon wheel and somehow seems shocked when his bones get crushed; peasants leave their protective cover and get shot; every dynamite stick they throw at the huddled men sitting close range in an open field misses completely; one peasant woman kills her suffering husband and then unexpectedly ends her own life, presumably Cimino thinking that would really magnify his point (whatever that is). And lastly in perhaps an homage to Ed Wood's love of stock footage, Sam Waterston pops up randomly and inappropriately to shockingly kill 2 of the main characters in footage that looks out of place. Michael Cimino didn't know what he wanted with this. He wanted historic detail, but used anachronistic music and dialogue. He wanted rich visuals but drowned them in sepia tones. He wanted to shoot every scene at the "golden hour" but killed its effect by overusing it. He wanted to inspire sympathy but portrayed peasants as mobs and slaughtered animals. He wanted deep feelings but no characters or dialogue to convey them. He wanted the auteur filmmaker's epic without earning it