That was an excellent one.

Thanks for the memories!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

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.

Arguably one of the most self-indulgent movies ever made. Heaven's Gate is the ultimate paradox of epic and empty. Few movies are as beautiful as this one, or as boring.Michael Cimino's account of the Johnston country war is like a museum of epic paintings, beautifully shot but void of intelligent dialogue and sympathetic characters.Kris Kristopherson goes through the movie as if he is suffering from a hangover, dreary and dull. Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert fair somewhat better but the problem is that Cimino is incapable of finding his characters motivation, so everyone seems lost. There is a major absence of backstory in this movie, and instead we have numerous 'cast of hundreds' scenes that are stretched out beyond any reason other than Cimino is in love with the images.Cimino is more interested in telling the story through the picture than through the writing, and he in so ham fisted in his approach that Heaven's Gate feels like a 1920's propaganda film by Griffith or Eisenstein. He doesn't seem to appreciate that movies have changed since then and so have moviegoers. For the audience it takes three seconds to comprehend a message that Cimino takes four minutes to convey. The sound mix is also bombastic, mainly because long segments of dialogue are inaudible behind the cacophony of horses and carriages. The only memorable about Heavens Gate is the photography, everything else is a waste.

This film had its critics, but i am not one of them. When i saw this epic work, the time flew as the story unfolded. I viewed it as a history lesson, of the west, and left the cinema elated and educated. Fantastic scenery, and set piece scenes, with quality performances to boot. One of my favourite westerns, and it has so much more depth than more popular fare.

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.