Great story but unfortunately poorly executed. Pity.

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."

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

593

600

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

If I could I would give 48516547325643873463

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

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.

#617

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

# 466

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.

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

Beautiful filmmaking.

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

Passes the time.

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.

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