Review of Heaven's Gate (1980) by Abram S — 03 Sep 2011

[I bumped it up to 2 stars because of what it's about- the brotherhood network above the law that genocides anyone it decides is in the way, and creates concentration camps, internments, reservations, and seeks to divide and conquer and impose communist cattle systems on human beings- even if the movie got lost in a coke-snorted haze, the idea was good.

Perhaps the content is why it was hated so much before it ever got released.] Somehow I made it to the end. It is awful. I am not going to follow critics and ridicule Cimino, they really have a hate for him that is unwarranted even though he is a strange fellow.

They attack him for his bizarre appearance and his elusiveness even though they worship Terrence Malick for some of the same things. Cimino made two great films, Deer Hunter and Year of the Dragon. Somehow the character writing has to be there, or the films turn into chaos and noise and pointless 30 minute scenes of people dancing or skating around in circles.

The characters in Gate are less than 1 dimensional, and we're supposed to react to what happens to them when it's just caricatures shrieking or cussing or posing. The story is about the wealth class wanting to genocide a bunch of impoverished immigrants standing in the way of profits for the right people, the Brotherhood.

One of theirs, the hero, goes against his kind and fights for the downtrodden. At the end the immigrants ride around in circles getting picked off one by one by the dastardly illuminaughties, and every death is so cartoonish it's laughable.

The moral of the story is, they will always get their way and you just have to deal with it. So it's sort of realistic historically, but lacking in human dimensions, because every human has a specific story and means to transcend the matrix.

Cimino only creates surface values in this silly movie.