theriverjordan’s review published on Letterboxd:
Director Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate” is a film accused of mass murder and the toppling of an empire.
Two careers (Cimino and star Kris Kristofferson), a movie studio (United Artists), and an entire cinematic movement (auteurism) — all fell to the guillotine of “Heaven’s Gate.”
Based on a territory dispute between immigrants and land barons in 1890s Wyoming, “Gate” was Cimino’s ploy to outdo “Apocalypse Now,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” and “Doctor Zhivago” all in one Western epic. Cimino even shot close to a million miles of film to achieve his oneupmanship.
What “Gate” is, though - is a movie that wants to be “War and Peace,” but - failing, actually captures the mood of one very specific section of the work perfectly: Part Eight. In those seventy pages (give or take your copy and translation), Tolstoy captured the melancholic post-war drifting and malaise that eventually leads to love.
So, too, does “Heaven’s Gate.” With opening scenes even reminiscent of a czarist-era winter’s ball, the film’s characters blow about their young ages with a lost despondency that too-soon makes them old at heart.
There have been entire chapters in cinema history books written about Cimino’s cruelty, hubris, and obsessive narcissistic ambition. Those accounts have a place, but “Gate” itself certainly does not belong on the many lists of ‘Worst Films Ever’ that it often haunts.
“Gate’s” high budget directionless-ness does no favours to its narrative, which can only be described as ‘meandering.’ But it’s a meander through a Moscow snowstorm in a horizon of life that stretches out for an eternity all in blinding white.