Review for Heaven's Gate Restored

For over thirty years the punchline to most film budget jokes was always: Heaven's Gate. It's true that Waterworld soon overtook that, but even then it was referred to as 'Kevin's Gate' a snide jab at this film as well as the costly water adventure. Following his huge success with The Deer Hunter which bagged Michael Cimino Oscars for Directing and Producing he was given free reign with Heaven's Gate to do whatever he wanted.

Now, sometimes that can result in amazing things such as Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. However, most of the time it results in a $40 million bomb which is what this film became. Not only a box office bomb, only gaining back a little over $3million of its budget back, but it was also scathed by the critics, nominated for five Golden Raspberry awards, Cimino winning for directing. This a film that bankrupt United Artists (a company that had been in existence since 1919 and were responsible for such classics as West Side Story and the James Bond series) and along with Francis Ford Coppola's overbudget Apocalypse Now! stopped almost all Director's from ever being given carte blanche by a studio ever again.

Heaven's Gate tells the story of the Johnson County War of 1892 between cattle barons backed by the government and the immigrant settlers. Starring Kris Kristofferson as Marshal James Averill he finds himself in the middle of the problems which become more and more hostile. This is shown over almost four hours that you really need to prepare yourself for to appreciate just what Cimino achieved when making this film.

Now, I have never seen Heaven's Gate before in any of its many forms and so it was difficult watching this film knowing what I knew about how it was made. This is a film that would spend a full day and over fifty takes on a few seconds of screen time, a film whose Director halted filming until a cloud they liked came into the correct position. If we argue that film is art you can look at other classic paintings and see that Rembrandt or Da Vinci didn't create something in a day or a week, maybe not even a few weeks, but may take months to create what will take up one canvas. However, there is being a perfectionist and then there is being almost insane about it, which I believe is what Cimino did with this film and unfortunately it shows.

Of course its one Oscar nomination for Art Direction is well deserved and it is surprising that it was not also nominated for costume and cinematography as it cannot be said that this film is not amazing to look at. However, I do have to say that watching this film was a chore. From what I have read about this new edition, it makes a lot more sense than its original theatrical release, which Cimino cut almost an hour worth of footage from. That being said, this film still feels more like a TV drama that would be spread over two-three episodes to fully appreciate.

The acting is a mixture of great and fine. The performances by Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges and Christopher Walken are great, but everyone else just feel like they are going through the motions. When you read about how much Cimino was more interested in the lighting than the acting, this is not so much a surprise. Many people have commented that the extra hour does help flesh out a lot of the performances and if this is true I am almost curious to want to see the butchered version. It is actually surprising that this wasn't a multiple disk set (like the Bladerunner one) with many more versions of this film, though the original cut which was nearly six hours might be a bit of a stretch to sit through, even for the biggest fans of the film.

The extras are a little bizarre as this seems to a film begging for a commentary from somebody. Even a critic or some of the people involved, I can understand if Cimino doesn't want to do it, but then if he expects us to sit through nearly four hours of his film surely he can too? The interviews with Jeff Bridges and Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond are nice, though don't really add much other than to explain the feelings towards the film and I think it really needed for the viewer to see what was wrong with the theatrical cut to explain that. Including extracts from Michael Epstein's documentary 'Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heavens Gate' is strange simply because they don't include the full thing. I would have preferred that they did and at least have a full coherent look at what went wrong with the creation of this film. This is a shame, as the documentary could have been a real selling point for this film.

Heaven's Gate is an odd film to review. It looks amazing and its transfer to Blu-ray is the best example of an old film on Blu-ray that I have seen. I'm not sure if that is the power of the Blu-ray or the actual creation of the film itself. The music by David Mansfield is great, though not as memorable as most westerns, but it fits the picture. The only problem with this film is the spectre of the past. It is hard to watch the film without remembering the ludicrous things Cimino did to create it and though I can't argue that the film looks amazing, the problem is I could also say that about any Michael Bay film too. Much like Bay's work, this is a film that is all style and very little substance and though I'm sure that fans of the film will rejoice that this version has seen the light of day, those who have not may find it a little hard to convince that this is the classic they say it is.