Heaven's Gate (1980)

Thanks for the memories!

How sad is this?

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This is an astonishing documentary that will wring your heart while it bends your mind

I waited 38 years to watch this, all because of the horrible reviews. bad press and the general disdain that the Hollywood King-Makers had for it. I watched the shortened version and and in my opinion it is a masterpiece of Western Film making. (except Sam Waterson, he's laughable in this). Our ancestors, the immigrants in this film, faced unbelievable hardships and yet they prevailed. Their lives are portrayed with accuracy, compassion, laughter and great, great sadness. A case of the "man" keeping the people down. If you are able, please watch this movie. It is worth it!

I agree with Jack Landman. Twenty years ago I saw a butchered version of Heaven's Gate on a 23 inch TV screen. In retrospect, it was pointless. Despite being a film buff I don't remember if the film was shown on the big screens here in Blighty. Finally, thirty-seven years after its release, I've seen the 217 minutes version on Blu-Ray on a 56 inch Cinemascope TV screen with digital sound. It's a magnificent achievement and I salute the late Cimino for having the guts and persistence to hold out for his personal vision and artistic creation.I'm not sure where to begin. Yes, there are longeurs, in the roller-skating scenes, for example, and yes, some dialogue is difficult to pick up. Nevertheless, the set design, acting, particularly by Kristofferson, Huppert and Walken, and landscape photography by Vilmos Zsigmond and Cimino's directing are flawless. The film is beautiful, moving, disturbing and sometimes exciting. Cimino makes us care about his characters and shows us something of what frontier life must have been like in the final years of the 19th century. There's a backbone of fact in the grim events of the Johnson County War that makes a reading of contemporary historical accounts essential.Heaven's Gate is all a great film should be. It has the sweep of David Lean and touches of Sam Peckinpah in the final battle scenes. They rank with those at the end of The Wild Bunch. Praise doesn't come much higher than that!

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

Michael Cimino's gigantic new western and his first film since the Oscar-winning "Deer Hunter", is apparently based on a historical incident that occurred in Johnson County, Wyoming in 1890: with the tacit approval of the state government, the county's wealthy cattle barons banded together in a systematic attempt to murder more than 100 German, Bulgarian, Russian and Ukrainian settlers who were encroaching on their lands. If one can say nothing else on behalf of "Heaven's Gate", it's probably the first western to celebrate the role played by central and eastern Europeans in the settlement of the American West ...This excerpt above is on behalf the Criterion Collection Edition of "Heaven's Gate" (found in the Internet). Michael Cimino made 10 movies from 1974 to 1996. All of them are Good. He ain't directing or producing anymore. Certainly, he is most under-appreciated. But I would like to expand on the main theme of the Movie - the way it's reviewed above, as tacit war of State Government vs. Band of Eastern European Settlers. Before I get to the point it's useful to remind that Cimino target the Eastern Europeans in America for second time. In "Deer Hunter" (1978), the trio American soldiers in Vietnam are of Russian Orthodox origin. Maybe that was intentional since it was the height of Cold War.On "Heaven's Gate", the Movie. I have watched it several times in the last three decades, never undistracted and alone. Until recently I couldn't even catch the plot. Thanks to Internet I read on-line that it's about the Johnson County War (historical event that have several Big Screen interpretations). Lastly, when I browsed the Movie on the computer I heard the settlers speak Russian and other Slav languages on their gatherings. Thus I made a connection that lead to this review. And truly speaking, several Cimino's films have peculiar ethnography - e.g., consider "Year of the Dragon" with China Town plot; "Sicilian" about Partisan Wars in Italy, etc.Talking of Ethnography and I want to say few words. How American Nation was formed? It's a principal question yet lot of historical matter is involved. Seemingly, the three colonial powers that ruled at different times is not an adequate explanation - Britain, Spain and France hardly give half the Heritage of this vast country. The traditional view should be shattered by many other contributors - Jews (before settlement in Palestine); Germans (before World Wars); Irish and Italians (all the time); People from the Pale (that is, Central and Eastern Europeans), etc. Colored people were there all the time, but that's another story. Muslim ethnos was not evident in American History until that has become fact in the past, say, 50 years. Thank you!