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I've never seen the movie theatrically so I'll take your word for it. However, I will note that Roger Ebert's pan review from 1981 complained about a lack of colors in the photography. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/heavens-gate-1981 "Cimino also shoots his picture in a maddening soft...

Does the short cut have the original dusty browns and yellows, or the revisionist colors Cimino imposed on the Director's Cut?

I would imagine that scenes are only "out of order" in the context of being compared to Cimino's cut. Rearranging the placement of scenes is something that any editor may do if he/she feels it will work better. At the very least, this sounds like an interesting intellectual experiment from...

Has anyone sat through it yet? How is it? The movie has a ton of repetition and bloat that begs to be trimmed.

I don't have time to watch this right now. I take it that Soderbergh edited a short version of the movie for himself, using the Bernard alias?

The characterization in the director's cut is still very weak. That wasn't just an editing problem. It's a flaw in the story's fundamental conception.

On top of the reductive simplicity of its moralizing, there's really very little story in the movie at all. For a film of this length, it needs more meat on its bones. As you say, the characters are all thinly sketched. The plot is very basic. Numerous scenes simply repeat information we were...

Makes sense. Thanks for the recap. I haven't read Final Cut.

Perhaps someone who knows the history of the production intimately can comment on this, but did the studio actually pressure Cimino to cut costs or hold him accountable during much of the production? My understanding was that, after Deer Hunter, Cimino was basically given a blank check to do...

If Heaven's Gate weren't such a scandalous bomb, it wouldn't be remembered at all today and certainly wouldn't be inducted into the Criterion Collection for reappraisal. To present it with hardly any context of what the movie is actually notable for is, at the very least, a missed opportunity...

Only in the most superficial and dismissive manner. The only interview that mentions a negative reaction to the film is Kris Kristofferson's, which goes something like: "I didn't understand some of the bad reviews. I always thought it was a great movie." And that's all he says about that. The...

The softness I think is likely more an issue with the source material than the resolution of the scan. There was never any chance of the Final Cut documentary being included with the Blu-ray. Cimino was heavily involved with the content on the disc, and still, even all these years later, will...

I've already voiced my issues with the disc, which are much the same as tippedcollar's here, earlier in the thread. I just want to say that, unlike him, I hadn't seen the movie in years prior to the Blu-ray and didn't approach the disc with any sort of preconceived notions of how it's supposed...

Even without behind-the-scenes tales of his behavior, one need look no further than the movie's title for proof of Michael Cimino's indulgence. As seen in the opening credits, the film's title is not "Heaven's Gate." It's "MICHAEL CIMINO'S HEAVEN'S GATE."

If he doesn't want to use ADR, then he shouldn't film scenes of characters talking in noisy environments that drown out the dialogue. He can't have it both ways. The scene where Averill first arrives in Wyoming and runs into his buddy the train porter goes on for four to five minutes of solid...

If that's the case, he shouldn't lock down his camera on characters talking for such long periods of time. If he doesn't want to be the type of filmmaker who relies on dialogue to tell his stories, then he needs to find another way to tell the damn story.

I don't think the movie would fare especially well in the current marketplace either, even divorced from its reputation. The problem with the film, in my opinion, is that it simply doesn't have enough story or character depth to justify its length and pace. It's really a rather thin story, when...

I agree. I don't see any contempt in the statement quoted above. I just see a filmmaker who wasn't particularly interested in making a traditional film noir, because he felt that it had been done before. Instead, he chose to use the opportunity to bring his own sensibility to the material.

How do we know whether either of those is accurate ot the original photographic intention? You can't use an old DVD or Laserdisc as a reference source. My question is when did Cimino decide that the movie should have such vibrant colors - when he made it, or only recently? Filmmakers go in with...

I'm not sure that I'm down with this transfer. It seems revisionist to me, especially if Zsigmond originally intended a dusty, "sepia" appearance (as shown in the "before" clips of the restoration featurette). The colors and contrast on the Blu-ray both look artificially boosted. Flesh tones are...