Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Pretty Good

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

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...

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.

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.

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.