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Basically, the backdrop of Heaven’s Gate is so rich and important that it should be thrilling, but it falls completely flat because it chooses to focus on a series of relationships that aren’t especially interesting and don’t really matter in comparison to the events surrounding them, and because the film is nearly four hours long and it's two and a half hours before the war even starts. And in that two and a half a hours, more time is given over to singing and watching people dance on roller-skates than it is to people trying to survive or to crush their enemies. The only explanation I can think of for this grave imbalance is that Cimino accidentally walked into Andrew Lloyd Webber in a corridor one day whilst they were both carrying scripts, and in the ensuing collision and confusion he wound up walking home with a screenplay that was half-Heaven’s Gate and half-Starlight Express.

Walk without rhythm, you won’t attract the worm

Once the war actually starts, the film turns incredibly brutal and nasty, shifting somewhat uncomfortably from the sweeping grandeur of its opening two-thirds to a grim and violent finale that finds the efforts of the heroes thwarted by the combined forces of the landowners' hired guns and the US Army, who are brought in to “arrest” the killers but have really been brought in to save them from the vengeful settlers. It’s incredibly cynical, and the final battle features plenty of blood, guts - some allegedly provided by unwilling cows that were supposedly disemboweled on set to provide “fake intestines” - and a general lack of humanity that is pretty bracing, or it would be if the preceding three hours hadn’t stripped away any interest the audience may have had in what happens to the characters.

The brutality of the last scenes are presaged by the death of Christopher Walken’s character, Nate Champion, whose name is made no less ridiculous by the fact that he is playing a person who actually lived at the time and actually had that actual name. Champion starts the film as a contract killer for the landowners, but turns his back on his paymasters after he sees company men gang-rape Huppert’s character. Deciding that he doesn’t want to work for men who would sanction such action, Champion leaves and is eventually cornered in a log cabin by a veritable platoon of his former colleagues. After writing a farewell note to his love, Walken bursts out of the burning cabin and is gunned down by the assembled mass gunslingers. It’s meant to be tragic, but he takes so long to die, despite being riddled with bullets, that the scene becomes slapstick. You’d expect such a lurid, over-the-top death to occur in a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker style spoof, not as one of the key scenes in a bloated epic.

However, all credit should go to Walken, who maintains his dancer’s sensibility in the scene and makes getting shot full of lead look funky. How his death throes have not become a gif-worthy Internet meme by this point is truly beyond me. Hopefully the good people at 4Chan will find time in their busy schedule of making everything on the Internet to actually make this a thing, because I am way too lazy to even contemplate doing so.

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