jc-999-591106 This movie proceeds very slowly, it could have been shortened by an hour. That said, the story and acting are very good. The sound not so much. Isabelle Huppert, Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges and the rest of the cast are amazing.

ignatzb I take it that the standard review is something along the lines of just calling it a well photographed flop, which perhaps it was. I recall one reviewer who was terribly upset about the subtitles in a few of the scenes, but this is the fate of subtitles which are widely used in this world to give foreigners magical access to speech in other languages. In China the written language is nearly independent of how it is spoken so while they all speak differently they all write the same thing, more or less. So I am a great fan of subtitles. I once watched a film I had seen before and was quite surprised to see the subtitles. I had remembered what people said quite forgotten having to read those words. What interested me much more was a recurrent motif of people circling around in a ring with multiple rings having some go clockwise and some counterclockwise. We first see this in a grand ball around a tree. We see it again in a dance in Wyoming We see it finally in the various groups of gun fighters and cavalry circling one way or another around the rapidly diminishing feuding groups. I'm not sure what this all means but it is one of the main motifs in the film. I have not read through all of the other critiques so I apologize if this is redundant. I have not noticed it mentioned before.

grantss 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.

Alan J. Jacobs I watched the full 3-1/2-hour+ version in a Brooklyn movie theater. It was not fun. Maybe it would have been funner if the theater was less full and I could stretch out my legs and relax, but we were packed in, and my neighbor to the right kept rubbing against me (accidenally), and a head in front of me kept bobbing up and down. (Like a middle-seat plane ride to Jackson Hole.) Heaven's Gate is a movie with spectacular scenes, especially the dance numbers and roller-skating numbers, but ultimately it was a big and very bloody mess, whose characters were both incoherently drawn and incoherent (at times I was thinking this was the first mumblecore movie, thanks to the gravelly, sotto voce Kris Kristofferson (I forgot what a great- looking man he was, that's something to see)). I also forgot that the movie was based on historical events, which made it somewhat more interesting for me, but I would rather have read a book about the Johnson County War than see this movie. The best scenes are the earliest ones, set at Harvard in 1870, where Kris Kristofferson, John Hurt and others celebrate their graduation with marching bands, drunken speeches, elaborate waltzes, and some aggressive sport. Once the scene shifts out to Wyoming (filmed in Montana), the movie becomes elliptical and obscure, and it didn't have to be that way. The elements of a coherent plot are there, but the director preferred to be a bit of a mystic, and to let the viewer decipher the relationships among the people, and figure out for themselves why they went from Massachusetts to Wyoming. But most viewers are not going to care, and will not want to figure it all out.Look, according to another review on IMDb, this is one of the big 3 expensive flops of all time (along with Ishtar and Waterworld). Thus, it's worth seeing, but a nice supply of Adderall might help you along.