Cimino was right all this time

I've never seen Heaven's Gate. Now I may have to. I just wish people felt this way about Ishtar! haha I thought it was hilarious and everyone I recommended it to liked it. I know it's considered a big flop.

So true, some things really get better with time. Seeing the film today I believe there are two reasons it failed in 1980. If you exclude the bad press the film received when it was released, the two things that made it a significant failure was the sepia color and the sound. As I mention in my original post, the sepia color that Cimino originally used for the film was a grave mistake. I saw the film on laserdisc back in the early 2000's with sepia intact, and I didn't particularly like the film. Although it was better than it's reputation even then (back then the film was seen as one of the worst ever made). In addition, the dialogue during some sequences was very hard to hear and understand. Adding subtitles would have made it a much nicer experience. I do not believe the laserdisc had subtitles. These two issues bogged down the film.

Seeing the film again on the Criterion blu-ray, in Cimino's own 2012 technicolor version, I marveled at the film. The colors were beautiful, and now the film came alive. This is the way it should ALWAYS have looked. Not in sepia, but Technicolor. With added subtitles I could follow the story perfectly - and the story and characters are great. I could now appreciate all the meticulous work Cimino put into the film.

The film was so good that I read Steven Bach’s revealing book Final Cut, about the volatile making of the film, and I realized if only the film had looked back then the way it looks now, with perhaps some added subtitles, it might have been received totally different. And time would have made it an obvious masterpiece to everyone, and not just to the few people who have seen the Criterion blu-ray.

Great post, although I do not agree that the first half hour could have been cut. An aspect of the film I really like is the friendship between Kristofferson and John Hurt. The contrast of how they went from a carefree time, being silly woman chasing partying students, to the seriousness of the real world as grownups, which Hurt's character couldn't completely embrace. He wanted to be back at the happy party days of youth. Not the serious drudgery where people's lives and future are at stake. While Kristofferson had entirely grown up, and accepted this development.

Sure the speech at Harvard perhaps feels like it goes on a bit too long, but it's all about Hurt's character being silly, and it fits the entire thing. In the last scene of the opening, before we see Kristofferson on the train 20 years later, Hurt says while they are having the last celebration. "James do you realize? It's over" and he was kinda right. It would all change.