I'm surprised, looking through the first 20 comments listed, not to see any reference to -Days of Heaven-. Both are director-fueled, idiosyncratic presentations of visions of the American West, wonderfully photographed, rather thinly plotted. Well, this one is more, shall we say, "grittily" photographed and not as idyllic, not with the DVD-esque sheen. Malick is not as prone as Cimino (see also -The Deer Hunter-, especially the first hour-or-so filled mostly with the party scene) to over-bloating the story at the expense of pacing. -Days of Heaven- can be irksome in its own ways, but it gets its story told in a timely fashion; -Heaven's Gate- is obviously, clearly, drawn out too long, without the benefit of an adept editor's craft or a scriptwriter's focus.
It's most unfortunate, too, since this could have been a classic, and you end up feeling sorry for it as it stands. Personally, I really wanted to like this, and was "into" it for even as long as an hour, but started to get tedious, and then got more tedious, and more tedious still, and then some more, and then culminating in a shoot-em-up sequence that was as unfocused and overly drawn-out as the previous 2 hours.
By coincidence, it happens that I saw -The Jack Bull- just days before viewing this -- and, as a portrayal of the ways of late-19th century Wyoming frontier, the "lawlessness" and so forth, it gets it done with much more economy.
Still, a 6.1 IMDb rating underrates this film, and I was surprised to see it that low. (Given the tendency of quality for films with a given rating, I was expecting to see a 6.8.) It *does* manage to reflect the amount of work that went into it. It's not a bad film, not a great one, just an interesting, otherwise well-done work dragged out way too thin and long to be great. On the whole, it rightfully falls somewhere right around the mean, between 6.5 and 7. (A strong 2.5 stars out of 4.)
It's most unfortunate, too, since this could have been a classic, and you end up feeling sorry for it as it stands. Personally, I really wanted to like this, and was "into" it for even as long as an hour, but started to get tedious, and then got more tedious, and more tedious still, and then some more, and then culminating in a shoot-em-up sequence that was as unfocused and overly drawn-out as the previous 2 hours.
By coincidence, it happens that I saw -The Jack Bull- just days before viewing this -- and, as a portrayal of the ways of late-19th century Wyoming frontier, the "lawlessness" and so forth, it gets it done with much more economy.
Still, a 6.1 IMDb rating underrates this film, and I was surprised to see it that low. (Given the tendency of quality for films with a given rating, I was expecting to see a 6.8.) It *does* manage to reflect the amount of work that went into it. It's not a bad film, not a great one, just an interesting, otherwise well-done work dragged out way too thin and long to be great. On the whole, it rightfully falls somewhere right around the mean, between 6.5 and 7. (A strong 2.5 stars out of 4.)