From my favorite movies..

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

I encourage all to watch this film for educational purposes. Anyone who believes this is good film I have simple test for you - did you really feel strong empathy for either side? For a film about two competing factions to work you have to have an emotional investment in one side in some cases both sides.I don't know if there was character development lost in the 100 minutes cut from Cimino's original working print or it was bad writing or bad directing. I strongly suspect it is a combination of all three. Two major issues. First the film does not provide a reasonable background on the behavior of the "Rustlers and Anarchists" - leading to the question did the ranchers have a legitimate set of grievances or were the ranchers just doing a land grab. Without that you can't become strongly invested in either side. Second the characters fly into unexplained rage or conflict. Was there some backstory that caused a trigger reaction causing conflict?Cimino should have cut the extravagant dance scenes which waste about 15 minutes of the film and used that time to draw us into the characters background.So what is the educational lesson here? You need a really good villain or a really good hero for a film like this to work - and preferably both. Cimino's two dimensional cardboard cutout heroes and villains just don't draw us in.It is not the length of the film - want to see how to do this on film watch Once Upon A Time In The West after watching Heaven's Gate. Same basic plot of both film - Once Upon A Time In The West it is the evil Morton railroad taking the little guy's land - Heaven's Gate it the cattleman's association...

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.

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.

Heaven's Gate is an epic vision by Filmmaker Michael Cimino. Whether you like it or not, it's Cimino's story that he wanted to tell. The end result was a box office cancer with several finished versions that bankrupted a studio and ruined the career of many in the entertainment industry. However, we are left with a movie that Cimino continues to have critics pan and praise with its countless highs and lows. Here are my 7 ways that could have saved Heaven's Gate from what is utterly became. 1. Stopping Cimino throughout the production. The Studio had several opportunities to save money and time by not allowing Cimino to go over budget several times and going over schedule multiple times. The excessive demand in production value and countless spending could have been halted if not minimized if you reigned Cimino in on multiple occasions. Filmed mostly in Montana, scenes were also shot at Oxford. However, filming in Newport, Rhode Island for less than a 5 minute scenes could have been completely scrapped. This also would have saved money and time for the sake of the Director's vision. Whether the final product would have been drastically different, the Studio would not have faced as such a giant disaster. 2. More back story. The movie is an epic drag when it comes to the subject matter and its overall plot. Giving a narration, subtitles for the non speaking English characters along with more backstory about the immigrants could have given this beautiful film a more "understandable" story to help the audience from hating it. The confusion the audience strives is that the long-winded sequences lack the direction of story. 3. Scrapping your minor characters. If the goal is to produce and epic five hour movie, then you need to keep your characters. However, if you wanted a better story without losing site of the main story you would need to cut back on the side stories from actors like John Hurt, Jeff Bridges, Geoffrey Lewis, Richard Masur and Mickey Rourke. This would have helped cut the final length of the movie and improved the central story line. 4. More romance. The story does lack a connection between the three main characters: Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert. Several critics have complained that the love interest between this romantic triangle could have greatly been bettered. 5. Edits, edits and more edits. Heaven's Gate has moments of pure beauty and epic scenes. How it is edited into a movie creates a long melodramatic story that baffles and goes nowhere. Although Heaven's Gate did have several final edited versions, the idea of a total re- edit, from its opening credits, to including flashbacks and rearranging scenes by manipulating the time sequence could have helped with the pacing of the movie. 6. Make Heaven's Gate into a 2 part movie if not a Trilogy. If the Studio made their single box office bomb into a 3 part epic, they had the chance of recouping their investment and keeping Cimino's vision of a 5 1/2 hour story. Along with option #5, editing the movie into 3 parts would have given the audience more time to digest the story and the vision that Cimino wanted to tell.