Delayed Reaction: Heaven's Gate

Premise: Some land barons fight some European immigrants in 1890s Wyoming.

Most movies I talk about on here only exist as movies. Dead Again is just this two-hour movie I liked watching and that's the full story. I don't know about its production. I don't have to think about its box office or stars. I can just talk about the movie and that's it. However, there are some that can never just be about the movie. The Crow is the movie in which Brandon Lee died while shooting. All the Money in the World is the movie that had to be reshot to replace Kevin Spacey. The Interview is the movie that caused Sony to be hacked.

Heaven's Gate is one of the latter movies. It is the epic Michael Cimino passion project that nearly broke a studio and hastened the end of the New Hollywood era. It was considered such a flop upon release that after four decades of positive reassessment, it still can't shake the stink of being a disaster.

I can't really rate Heaven's Gate. I watched all 3+ hours of it from the perspective of someone who knew it went over budget and knew it was a nightmare to make. My notes for this were things like "That scene looks like a lot a money went into that", "That's so many extras for that", and "How hard was it to get that shot?"

It's a very good-looking movie. I can see how it went over budget, and a lower budget version of this would've been pretty bad. I like the cast. It's not the first person I would've thought of for any of the roles and that works for it. It's better that it's Kris Kristofferson and not a movie star like a Burt Reynolds. I like that it's Isabelle Huppert and not Jane Fonda with a French accent.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t enthralled enough by the visuals, performances, or conflicts to stay interested for the incredible run time. There's a difference between a story needing some time to breathe and simply taking up too much time. My go to example is when I read the abridged The Count of Monte Cristo and the unabridged version years later. I adored the abridged version when I read it. Unabridged is a thousand pages longer yet I couldn't tell you a single story beat that wasn't in the abridge version. The only thing the unabridged version offered me was more pages. That's how Heaven's Gate felt to me. I truly don't understand how there isn't a 2- or 2.5-hour version of it that could be just as good. There are long movies that do need that length; one's I don't even love. Once Upon a Time in America is an OK movie, and it really does need its length. Heaven's Gate is simply bloated by ambition. Or maybe that's its reputation still informing me 35 years later.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend