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Well, let’s stop that nonsense right now: Heaven’s Gate is a terrible, terrible movie. It's way too long, indulgent in the worst possible way, and it hinges on a love triangle between country music legend and Blade actor Kris Kristofferson, Isabelle Huppert and Christopher Walken as a Marshal, a brothel madam and a hired killer, respectively, that is about as dynamic as a lawn jockey, though nowhere near as colorful. There, I’m sure that will put an end to it.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t things about the film that are good, because that would be completely disingenuous. Heaven’s Gate is an absolutely beautiful looking film that captures the dust and grit of the old west better than perhaps any other film ever made. Every single shot in the film is a gorgeous masterwork, it’s a sepia-tone elegy to the frontier that makes turn of the century Wyoming look positively mythic, and it’s hard not to look at the visual beauty of the film with anything other than awe.

That’s saying nothing of the scale of the film, which is jaw-dropping. Cimino’s obsessive attention to detail was somewhat infamous - he once asked for a whole street set, which had been painstakingly built to his specifications, be taken apart and put back together again because it didn’t look right - but it also resulted in a film that has the scope and grandeur of an old-school epic. It recalls Doctor Zhivago and Once Upon A Time In The West: grandiose films about grandiose themes, and in an age where we can great whole worlds inside a computer, it’s undoubtedly impressive to see a film in which so much of what was on screen had to be built from scratch.

However, praising the cinematography of an historical epic is a bit like praising the set design in porn: it’s a bonus if it’s good, but it shouldn’t be the main attraction. The central relationship between Kristofferson, Huppert and Walken is dull and leaden, never reaching the heights of emotion that an epic like this deserves, More importantly, it distracts from the genuinely interesting setting of the film, which takes place against the backdrop of the Johnson County War, a conflict between rich, wealthy landowners and poor European settlers that escalated when the landowners started bringing in hired guns to flat out murder anyone who was caught, or even suspected of, stealing their livestock. Truly, it was some OG shit.

The Johnson County War went on to become an important part of the mythology of the West, and its easy to see how it has become romanticized in the hundreds of Westerns - most notably Shane - that use the basic set up of rich, greedy and corrupt landowners violently suppressing the poor farmers who had to steal to survive. It’s a story of class struggle that resonates throughout American history, and if someone made a film based on the Johnson County War today, it’d easily work as an allegory for the current tension between the uber-rich and everyone else. It’s played a crucial part in shaping the way in which America perceives its own past, and I don’t think it is going too far to say that you could pretty much guess someone’s political affiliations nowadays by asking them if they sided with the ranchers or the immigrants.

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