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Let’s start with the most basic question Why is watching Heaven’s Gate so painful and unpleasant? I am not talking about the plot or the story, but rather the film’s actual visual texture. This could well be considered one of the most revolting movies I have ever watched. The director Michael Cimino begins his narrative at Harvard, continues it in Montana, and finishes it on an ocean liner. However, dismal industrial gloom overshadows everything. In every shot that can possibly justify it, there are clouds and billows of dirty yellow smoke. When Cimino runs out of smoke, he gives us fog and dust so much of it that can barely see anything. That’s still not enough. Cimino soft-focuses the film in a way that people and places are only just about visible. And then he goes after the colors.
I know, I know. He’s trying to demystify the West if such a thing is designable, and all other things relations try to do when they actually do not want to make a Western. But this movie is a thesis on despicable excess.
The screen was so foggy and yellowish-brown that you would want to grab Windex. When the viewer is unable to appreciate the most basic part of viewing the film, the director faces serious challenges.
Cimino’s issues with the viewer are even worse. Anyway, Heaven’s Gate has turned into a famous film for all the wrong reasons. It was badly received in its New York screening, with many critics bursting out of the theater in disgust. The film cost an awful lot to produce 36 million dollars. It ballooned to an astounding running time of four hours which seems excessive. Big, rough cuts never work. Knowing that it had been battered after a United Artists executive seemed to be unhappily confused about what he wanted to say about the reviews. He wanted to express that negative reviews were given to cover up the absolute rubbish of a film that was made. He only seems to protest and drag on cut after cut while in reality, it became harder to watch. Claiming that if it had furiously rough cuts at four hours paces, they are infuriating at a more reasonable 140 minutes. In fact, at his length, it is barely edited or photographed enough to construct anything coherent. There are so many strange choices made in this film, such as Walken appearing to be in quite a few of the westerns before waving goodbye at the camera getting to the closeup, and properly introducing himself.
John Hurt moves around but doesn’t really have a direction. In the film, Kris Kristofferson plays the lead but does not seem to be able to develop enough depth in the role for us to care about him, or remember him, at all.
The first part shows Harvard (which they filmed in England for some reason). It depicts Kristofferson and Hurt and some other young optimistic men getting their degrees in 1870. They board a ship to America and set out to “civilize” the country. Kristofferson decides he is going to the west sell, and aids in developing the region. He justifies this choice in a voice over, and in my opinion, the film would have been more interesting if he did it all it should have been explained as the film played. He serves as a lawman out west and hears there is a scheme out in the cattle breeders association to recruit a mercenary force to wipe out 125 newly settled Europeans who are described as ‘anarchists’, murderers, and thieves. Most of the movie will be focused on this conspiracy, Ȩas well as the efforts taken by Kristofferson to thwart it, Walken’s, and Kristofferson’s and Walken’s private dealings with a Montana madam (Isabelle Huppert).
In a film where absolutely all aspects are poorly managed, the treatment of the immigrants is just as terrible. He perceives them as a formless mass.
Men craft armored wagons out of logs in a range of battle scenes and propel them into the firing zone, although anyone can flank them and open fire. There’s more to this, much more. It all can be simplified to much less. This film is a $36 million blunder. It is, to put it mildly, the most disgusting waste of cinematography that I have ever witnessed, and believe me, I have watched Paint Your Wagon.
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