Heaven's Gate

This is not a "bad" film. It is a horribly miscalculated one. Cimino thinks his characters are multi-dimensional enough to flesh out a 3 hour long movie. He is wrong. Cimino thinks that his movie can not stand one more minute, nay, SECOND of editing. He is wrong. He is wrong about a lot of things. There IS an interesting story buried in here, and some of his compositions are genius (sheet with the bullet hole, for one) but the director is too in love with his vision to bother with telling it.

I spent almost 4 hours with these people and I can't tell you a single name but I can tell you the exact time stamp a bub appeared. Cimino lets every single scene breathe until it's way to close and going down your neck and starts rubbing your shoulders.

The film's entire production history, criticism, and historical relevance can be summed up in my watching Criterion's edition with my Dad: himself an armchair Western cinema savant, we finish the dual speeches between Joseph Cotten and John Hurt, laying out the schizophrenic moralism and issues of integrity underlying the period's American Expansion and the responsibility inherent in White Man's Burden, then he pauses the movie. "I did not understand a word of what they just said."

Even the cult that took its name from this movie was around for a shorter time than this. Convoluted and doesn't know what it's doing half the time. It's bloated as hell, but for some reason i'm in awe of it. Its mammoth presentation was unforgettable, contrasting the characters themselves who were forgettable. A true epic, of which its failures cripple it from being a true masterpiece of the ages.

There's nothing wrong with epics or sepia tones. But there is something overblown and self-indulgent about this movie. It's desperately in need of an anyone-but-the-director's cut. It's all beautifully shot and certain scenes, especially the dances, are fine inclusions even if they don't do much to support the story. But a lot of it is just filler. Still, it's not an awful movie, and the story itself is a reasonably compelling anti-Western, exploring ugly episodes from our nation's history.

A giant mess. The director's cut moves so slowly that the only thing that pulled me through the star-studded film was that every now and again a familiar face, looking really young, would pop up.

This is huge. Huge failure. Huge beauty. Huge boringness. Huge huge.

In which Cimino uses his considerable New Hollywood clout to construct a picture of novelistic grandeur. There is indeed a great movie trapped somewhere among the lingering shots of immigrant scenes. John Hurt's character is pretty much my favorite ever. A top notch editor operating w/out Cimino peering over his shoulder probably could've made it into the masterpiece it should've been. Other major drawbacks include dusty sepia toned visuals and the worst sound since The Jazz Singer

Incredible production and cinematic values but it's very problematic. With more focused sculpting it could have been a grand tale of how USA is built on layers of blood and cruelty, and it's bloody alright but it's completely unfinished and goes wheels off in every direction. Maybe the reported insane animal cruelty (they blew up a horse with dynamite) is a good symbol of how lack of restraint can lead to excess to the point of a cinematic entropy resulting in good old plain and simple boredom

Michael Cimino did the Best-Picture-win-to-career-suicide speedrun and won. Watched the Criterion DVD. Almost earns its massive runtime but not quite. I could have done with 3 or 4 fewer 10-minute sequences of people putzing around to music. Everything following the huge (excellent) battle sequence felt rather clunky, and I have no idea what I was supposed to get from the final scene. Why would I care that he got a yacht with his college girlfriend? So what?

Over-romanticizes its subjects to the extreme, but absolutely deserves to be described as Epic.

There's some gorgeous composition and pretty much nothing else.

Dead movie with beauty and worth coming out of its many, deep wounds. Dies slowly. Very underserving of the critical mauling it got on its day. Beware animal lovers: Horsies die, can't even tell how many.

Majestic. A mix of Visconti, Ford and Leone. Maybe it's not perfectly accurate historically, but it has powerful allegories of history and mankind: Rich vs poor, immigrants vs WASP, ethic vs legality, revolutionaries, servants of the power, upper-class rebels, sloths, poor simple men. For Cimino, the United States are born in blood, in unjustice, in class struggle. It has few flaws, yes, but it has the strenght of a classic. And what a beauty the final battle. It flopped because bad production.

This is a really, really hard one to put a numerical ranking to. It's an absolutely gorgeous movie, with some great performances, good music, and an interesting story. It's also unnecessarily lengthy. But that alone is not enough to warrant the unmitigated hatred it got from the top critics of the time. It's definitely worth a watch, and I definitely enjoyed a lot of things about it.

Visually striking movie that fails in its ambition to be a tragic epic on the American crucible. Badly in need of another writer to improve dialogue and characterisation, a lesson the filmmaker had learned by the time he made his next movie...when he hired Oliver Stone. Aspects of the narrative and premise resemble McCABE AND MRS MILLER. And the tripartite structure is seemingly not without some vague connection to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

Like Coppola, Cimino is very much taking cues from the European masters, particularly Visconti, but the underlying sadness that eventually engulfs the film is reminiscent of Ford. So you have both a cynical melancholy view of the old West combined with a sense of tragic inevitability: a near perfect marriage. Cimino/Zsigmond's work here is truly astonishing, like a series of gorgeous impressionist paintings brought to vivid bloody life. Flawed but brilliant.

Though unnecessarily long, this film has merits: wonderful scenery and cinematography, above-average acting (though Kristofferson can get a bit wooden), and an interesting storyline. But it's justifiably panned because Cimino got lost in and enraptured with his own screenplay, leaving him unable to make the crucial edits that would have let the movie flow instead of getting bogged down time after time. I'd welcome an aptly-edited 2-hour version instead of this failed attempt at an epic.

Great story but unfortunately poorly executed. Pity.

Beautiful filmmaking.

If I could I would give 48516547325643873463

It's not a flawed masterpiece; it's a masterful flaw. Not as bad as everybody said it was when it came out -- after all, all that money and talent and perfectionism yields *something* -- just remarkably not meaty or rich

A film like this will never be made again. Monumental, over-indulgent, punishing at times, and astonishingly beautiful. A must-watch for any fan of the overstuffed epics of Visconti, Fellini, Bartollucci, Leone or Coppola.

Heaven's Gate, directed by Michael Cimino, is an immersive, visually stunning film. It features rich characters and extraordinary cinematography, gaining appreciation over time. Despite its artistic merit, it's also known for its troubled production, budget overruns, and Cimino's difficult personality, which contributed to its initial failure and the end of the New Hollywood era. While not flawless, this ambitious film offers a captivating look at a bygone era of filmmaking.

Undoubtedly, much of the criticism comes from such a slow-paced film filled with extravagances (oh, another dance sequence) and wild tonal shifts (Hurt's character is among the slapstick in a pretty serious drama). There's little character, either, except for a weird love triangle. By the time we get to the final battle, have you still learned anyone's name? At least it was pretty to look at. Favorite scene: there's a juggler you can see through a window and he's not bad.

Gorgeous cinematography and production values at times, but overall it's an uninteresting, unfocused, overlong, overindulgent mess, with a dose of melancholy nihilism that doesn't sit right with me. The movie's constant attempts at profundity fall flat nearly every time.

I saw the long version of this, which wasn't famously butchered by the studio. Incredible cast, but I have to think there was something between the butchered version and this one, which is over 3.5 hours and feels longer. There must have been a happy medium somewhere. It's not bad, and when it's good it is really good (some of the large scale action sequences are impressive, if a bit confusing), but it's just so slow. Impressive in scope and ambition, and probably worth getting through once.

Has there ever been a director emerge as a major player, then fall so far with the follow-up to his breakthrough? Of course, it's a lot better than the scathing reception of the time suggests. Too long, bloated and uneven, but with moments of great power and beauty...it may have the reputation as a colossal folly, but at its best it's very good, reminding one of how high films of that era aimed. Sadly, it was essentially the death knell for such auteur-driven product.

I think any reasonable, film literate person would have to admit that it's a gorgeous achievement. If the flaws bother you, it's fair to say that you don't think it's a masterpiece. I think it is, but I see the other side. What I don't see is calling it a complete failure and an unmitigated disaster. That's just not even close to this film.

Cinematography.

The narrative skeleton is very standard western stuff, but Cimino blows it up to a huge three-and-a-half-hour production (in the full cut) with grand sets and an all-star cast, and infuses it with that New Hollywood writing and aesthetic. The result is a bit strange; its adherence to genre conventions means it lacks detail as a character drama, while its very slow boil takes the edge off the action. On the flip side, the Old West has seldom looked quite so epic, lush, and fleshed-out.

Really nice scenes and really beautiful landscapes. Characters and story not that special.

(2012 Criterion Release) Hollywood's red-headed step-child is a thing of beauty. Not saying it's not without its flaws, but so much better in its restored form than the beating it took from the studio on it's initial wide release. Gorgeous film.

An overly long, ugly, boring film.

Kris Kristofferson & Christopher Walken were good. Isabelle Huppert was beautiful. Beautiful scenery. Crap directing. Scene selection & pacing was also a complete nightmare. I particularly disliked that so much of the story was so badly obfuscated. It was impossible to follow what was going on & important story points were muddled. Even the deaths of prominent characters is handled badly. The plot takes crazy liberties with the actual true events. Bad editing makes it unduly long. (*New Tier 5)

This sort of unchecked artistic hubris is somehow both confusing and kinda brilliant. Cimino got way over his head, and then went even further, crafting an epic American portrait that often feels like it must be the most wildly inaccurate portrait of all time. I think this is a movie for people whose favorite part of The Deer Hunter is the wedding scene. Also, my favorite part of The Deer Hunter is the wedding scene. If movies were always like this one, I bet I would hate movies.

63.000

Michael Cimino #2

How pointlessly long and drawn out is this movie? I was almost excited to see the rape scene, since it meant something would finally start happening, over 2 hours into this movie.

Lumbering, turgid, at times interminable epic never says in one word what it can't say in five, and tells its tale in the most unbelievably convoluted manner. That it is ultimately passable and worth seeing is for Cimino's brilliance as a visual director and for his expert staging of crowd and battle scenes; the cinematography is also quite stunning at times in gorgeous sepia tones, and Kristofferson makes for a commanding (if not especially accomplished) leading man.

It's good that such a film exists where in one of the few times it's been able to happen a director could make a film exactly how he wanted. You can see just how grand the scale of everything from the sets to the amount of extras to the dangerous stunts and harm possibly inflicted on many making this. It's a shame that many people used hindsight as a way to explain why this movie did bad at the box office; sometimes people just aren't interested. Though badly paced, it's beautiful and gritty.

Wildly ambitious but overly long, it's almost as if the director realized he was in the midst of a bridge bonfire and had to say absolutely everything he wanted to say in one film.

58.000

#617

Flawed but so beautiful and with such rich content that I couldn't help really liking it. Cimino is obviously indulging whims everywhere, I don't think there's a single scene that couldn't use some cutting and there are quite a few times where everything just grinds to a halt, but underneath it all is a really compelling and dark western struggling to get out and impress.

Passes the time.

593

3 hours of my life i'll never get back.

With all of the baggage associated with Heaven's Gate, it's almost hard just to look at it as a movie. In all honesty, it's not really THAT bad. It's not great, but for all of its faults it does have some positives. Although there's a bit too much smoke and dust, some of the shots are gorgeous. The acting is all competent, and the story at least has an interesting premise. The execution doesn't always work, but it's far from the worst thing ever made.

So bad it's not good, it's just really really bad. At least Christopher Walken is cool in it.

600

# 466

This film opened to some of the most disastrous reviews any movie ever received. It was said to have "sunk" a major studio, United Artists, and the career of its director, Michael Cimino. Today, however, there is a second wave of critical reaction to Heaven's Gate - much kinder, more forgiving of the film's (real) flaws, more aware it's (real) strengths. To understand today's more sympathetic viewing of the film, check out the excellent user's reviews on www.imdb.com.

Bad, but not that bad. The Boondock Saints was worse.