Rating: 
Summary: It's not the editing, it's the script
Review: What's most dismaying about this much-maligned epic disaster is how much of the 219 minute version is actually quite good. Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is stunningly beautiful, David Mansfield's score is wonderfully evocative, and the sheer scale of some of the sequences is absolutely breathtaking. So it's a pity that the sound mix is so bad we can't hear most of the dialogue in crucial scenes, and that the script is so dire that it probably wouldn't help if we could. Key questions which most films answer (ostensibly, at least) in the first thirty minutes - Who are these people? What are their relationships? What do they want? - are left largely unaddressed. The audience is left floundering among admittedly beautiful set-pieces which make little sense, and overlong scenes which add nothing to a story we can't understand. It's a shame, because there is the essence of a great story here: starving immigrant landholders legally exterminated by ruthless cattle barons, and the idealistic minority who try to prevent their slaughter. That's dramatic; that's exciting; that's full of the necessary conflict. But in Cimino's hands - as a writer at least - it becomes directionless, obscure and, with the exception of one or two bloodthirsty shoot-outs, relentlessly dull. With a few new expository scenes, a cleaned-up sound mix, and some ruthless editing, this would have been a decent film. One day, some audacious team of filmmakers is going to tackle this story again. But only when 'Heaven's Gate' is long forgotten, and - if the public reaction in 1980 is any indication - when American audiences are ready to face up to the moral ambiguity which lies at the heart of so much of their history.
Rating: 
Summary: Good western
Review: Most folks say this is overblown and not to good.
Some people think this is all show and no go.
They are wrong. This is a solid western epic.
Great action.
Rating:
Summary: One of the last of the great American movies
Review: This is no more a 'Western' than Heart of Darkness is an 'African'. Like The Deer Hunter, and even more successfully, it
is a political parable, describing the tensions between American
idealism and the realities of American power. It is one of a group of movies, mostly made in the seventies, which gave us real insight into the Matter of America -- the constant tensions between what we believe ourselves to be and what we actually are.
The group of absentee cattlemen -- British and North Eastern
brahmins -- who make decisions which affect the life of real,
working people -- continue to stand for the tensions which still exist between the North Eastern axis of Boston/New York/
Washington whose contempt for the American heartland and the struggles of her people have actually increased in recent years. To see this movie as a failed western is to see Apocalypse Now as a failed war movie or Citizen Kane as a failed biopic. There was real anger, real, visceral understanding of the differences between Federal Government corruption and big business decisions and the interests of the people they pretended to represent. Cimino was as instinctive a film maker as Kubrick but unfortunately didn't have the benefit of being
exiled to England, along with Kramer and a few others, by political forces which Hollywood has rarely had the nerve or the intelligence to resist. Hollywood hasn't yet come to terms with the betrayals of McCarthyism and its terrible desertion of black activists like Paul Robeson, let alone its contemptible treatment of serious film makers. Like Orson Wells, Cimino was sacrificed for his politics, not his ego and like Wells he was never able to capture the coherence of his early work.. He was trying to do something as new and important as Ford did in Grapes of Wrath, but the tide was already turning against him and it seems it suited the powers that be to pretend he had 'destroyed' a studio when many other directors have had as bad financial failures (Von Stroheim and the Scarlet Empress bombed as badly, Wizard of Oz was a box office flop when it first appeared, for instance and Hawks and Hepburn lost their contracts after Bringing Up Baby). If the studio had promoted Heaven's Gate for the fine film it was, they probably would have recouped their money by now. People who fail to understand its virtues, fail to understand the cinema itself. They want only sensation and sentimentality, which Hollywood continues to celebrate and reward, not serious
adult cinema.
Rating: 
Summary: Watchable, kind of like a car crash is watchable
Review: Somewhere, buried in the mishmash was a passably decent western. Good luck finding it.Part Fiddler on the Roof, part Dr. Zhivago (the number one bad guy even *dresses* like a ... commissar!) part How the West Was Won, part bad 70s Kristoffersen as Actor, part soft-core porn, oh man, it has the worst of everything, including unbelievably bad "editing" that has one scene of Kris throwing a stick of dynamite at a bunch of peasent women carrying rifles! (I swear to god it's in there). It was an OK movie up to the point where the Russian/Polish/German/who knows peasantry decides to fight back, at which point it becomes completely incomprehensible. The whole big "fight" scene is probably the worst mess ever filmed. Masterpiece? You guys must have seen a different cut than I did because there was nothing even remotely close to being masterful in the entire movie. If it had concentrated on why a wealthy Harvard Graduate became a slumming county sheriff in the middle of nowhere it might have been interesting. But we get no clues as to why Kris heads West. And this after the interminable Harvard Graduation scenes!... Robert St. James
Albany, Oregon.
Rating:
Summary: Have you noticed that no one ever gives this film 3 stars...
Review: It's always 1 or 5 (the occasional 2 or 4 are just cowards...). This is a film you either adore or detest. Those who adore it (moi, for instance, as the 5 star rating clearly indicates) are usually very patient movie watchers who like to watch a film unfold at its own pace. How many films can you name that are still going through exposition an hour and half into the film? David Bern once said that movies are nothing but pictures and images; stories are just a trick to get you to watch them. You could turn off the sound and mix up the reels (some probably think that happened when they saw it in the theatre), and this would still be a feast for the eyes. Cimino's lush vision of Montana is overwhelming. It's like a stroll through a moving Bierstadt exhibition. It contains pieces that are almost perfect acts of filmmaking - such as the skating sequence, which could stand alone as a short (the 1 star folks just stopped reading, muttering the word "dilatant" under their collective breaths). But despite its cinematic saturation, Heaven's Gate has a powerful, complex story. It's a story about class barbarism, and how the American Aristocracy of the last century committed mass murder in the West, with the help of the Government and the Military. It has a love story between two people who wouldn't have touched each other in the "civilized" East. It has intense performances by Isabella Hupert, Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken, Sam Waterston, et al. Yes, this is clearly not a film for everyone - in fact, if it was made for anyone, it was for Michael Cimino - but it is a film that some of us are glad was made. If you like LONG, CHALLANGING films by self-indulgent artists, rent it - and if you love it, you'll have to buy it; and if you hate it, well, you probably wasted five bucks and couldn't even get to the second tape...
Rating:
Summary: Why Did I Give This Bona Fide Stinkeroo Even One Star?
Review: You can spend nearly four hours of your time watching writer/director Michael Cimino's 1980 "Heaven's Gate" and come away satisfied for any number of reasons . . . You may, for example, have decided that this is the lesser of two evils as opposed to listening to your pet gerbil sing "Pagliacci." Not knowing your gerbil, or his vocal abilities, I'm willing to concede that "Heaven's Gate" may just barely have been the better option. There are people I know (and respect, by the way) -- intelligent, articulate, and sensitive -- who swear that "Heaven's Gate" is an overlooked masterpiece; invariably, however, they're the same people who count the individual dots in a Georges Seurat painting. But unlike Seurat's "pointillism" approach, Cimino's "overlooked masterpiece" is a film in which the individual dots never manage to quite add up to anything. A breathtakingly solid all-star cast, for example, is (with the possible exception of Christopher Walken) wasted. As is the truly incredible cinematography of Vilmos Zsigmond. As is the costuming, the location work, the music, the . . . Never mind; you see where I'm headed here. Everything, tragically, is wasted in this "overlooked masterpiece." There's an analogy at work: Orson Welles, the "boy-genius" of the 1940s, brilliant, ego-driven, given entirely too much control over his own projects. Forget, for the moment, "Citizen Kane" or "The Magnificent Ambersons" (etc., etc., etc.) Think of . . . "MacBeth," Welles' lavishly (for the times)-mounted filmic expedition into a Shakespeare masterpiece: Welles decreed for this film a high degree of "authenticity," which included a moody, mostly dark, mist-laden, bleak cinematographic treatment of the Scottish highlands, which was matched by the proclivity of all characters to render their lines in a Scottish "burr"; the end result, sadly, was a film in which one can neither see --nor understand -- a damn thing! Thus Cimino, with "Heaven's Gate:" Given entirely too much control, he manages to construct a film in which -- although we can see much (despite the industrial haze which seems to pervade far too many scenes), and in which we may even be able to understand most of the lines that are spoken -- we're likely to come away realizing that we've neither seen (nor understood) a damn thing. And worse yet, we've also not met much of anyone in the film about whom we care a whit. So why did I give this film even one star? Because, when I tried my best to rate it on a minus scale, Amazon's system kept kicking my review back at me with a "Whoops! Looks like you forgot to fill in a required space!" message. OK . . . so consider this an example of "damning with FAINT praise."
Rating:
Summary: Totally Awesome
Review: I think Heaven's Gate would rate in the top 5 greatest westerns ever produced. I firmly believed that the movie was way ahead of its time and flopped as such. Lets face it, if Rambo was released today it probably wouln't last past opening night, or go straight to video. But in 1985, because of ideal social and cultural circumstances it was a blockbuster. Likewise I think that Heaven's Gate would be a masterpeice by today's standards only I dont think that Hollywood is up to making such a high quality film nowadays. In any case I think that modern movie fans would really like this movie. It is a "black sheep" compared to the run of the mill 80's cinema that tends to get such bad press these days.
Rating: 
Summary: DVD vs VHS
Review: This is truly a remarkable movie. Far underrated and dismissed due to the hubbub over the cost and Cimino's behavior during filming. Heavens Gate is visually stunning, a marvel of period work with rich detail and texture. It is a bit long at times and the DVD version looks and sounds far superior to the VHS version. However I noticed there are no subtitles in the DVD version when the immigrants speak. Has anyone else noticed this? If this is a fault of MGM it is a major gaff and allows much dialog to be missed. Anyway, a movie much better that most of the reviews, and a must see for any film buff.
Rating:
Summary: I hope this will be recognised someday!
Review: One of my all time favourites, American poetry is rare to come by, but here we have it in abundance, magic. Hopefully a featurepacked disc will come soon featurein dirs commentary, documentaries etc. I will be first in line. Also hope whoever owns this film preserves it the way it dserves to be preserved. It rises in the mind and with time will perhaps become as revered as it deserves!
Rating:
Summary: A movie for all times
Review: I first saw the original and horribly maimed version of this movie twenty years ago. I was a youngster then and did not quite like it. Now, when I see the full version ( or is it?... what happened during those twenty years since graduation to Wyoming? )I cannot stop wondering what made critics be so cruel to Michael Cimino and his movie. Was it the fact of dealing with an uncomfortable theme to the classic image of the American people? Was it its lenght or cost? But how could they miss things that were so revolutionary as the color and the way he got it ( long before Spielberg's Private Ryan ), the mingling of voices with all other sounds ( now quite common ), the psychological depth of the characters, the exceptional photographic work, and so on, and so on... I wish someone would give Mike Cimino again all the money he would want to make a film, in order for all of us, true Cinema fans, to get a brief glimpse as to what movies will be, in twenty years time.
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