Some films aren’t so well received initially upon release and later grow to become cult classics or are revised to become great in the estimation of critics. This film however seems to have taken the opposite trajectory, being lauded early on but its reputation has suffered as time goes by. Partly this was because director Michael Cimino never made another good film after this and Heaven’s Gate in particular was one of the greatest flops of all time. After watching it, that seems about right to me as while the film is beautifully crafted, its core premise is fatally flawed and fundamentally stupid.

Life is good for a group of friends who are members of a Russian-American community in a small town in Western Pennsylvania. They work at the local steel mill, hang out at a bar and go hunting together. Three of them are due to go to serve in Vietnam but before that one of them, Steven, throws a lavish a wedding in town. The two others, Michael and Nick, are in love with the same woman Linda but she is with Nick so Michael tries to stay out of their way. In Vietnam, the three witness the horrors of war are captured by the Viet Cong. Their captors force the prisoners to play Russian roulette and Michael gets Nick to take greater risks during the game to use the gun to escape. All three of them manage to survive but all are permanently scarred in different ways. Nick in particular seems to have become addicted to the thrill of Russian roulette and keeps risking his life in games for money.

This is a three-hour long film and an hour passes before the three friends ever make it to Vietnam. It takes its time to set things up and that’s great as it allows the personalities and the background of the characters to emerge from their many interactions with one another. It’s a little puzzling why the plot calls for this community to be specifically Russian-Americans but it does make their marriage ceremony and celebrations very distinctive. The actors are all top talents of course and play their roles extremely well and while I personally wouldn’t like to be friends with these people, I can accept that this is meant to be a picture of idyll contentment in small town America. The high production standards are maintained throughout the film including the scenes set in what is supposed to be Vietnam. It also includes Michael’s return to his home town and his difficulty in reintegrating into a society that sees him as a hero and yet has no idea what he and his friends have gone through. I believe that this was one of the first films to address soldiers’ PTSD after Vietnam and so it’s wonder why it was so highly praised in its time.

At the same time, this is a film is so singularly obsessed with the game of Russian roulette that it ends up displacing everything else. The horror of their experiences in Vietnam, Nick’s inability to move past his trauma and even Michael’s disgust with how his friends in the US treat the threat of violence so lightly are all bound up in the game. It’s quite something that Michael actually witnesses a soldier casually murder women and children in Vietnam but it is Russian roulette that matters for the film. I get that it’s meant as a metaphor but the director leans on this shorthand for all of the dramatic heavy lifting and it simply cannot support the narrative weight. It acts as if there is some kind of inherent mystique or cultural significance to the game when it is really something that exists more in fiction than in reality and is just plain stupid anyway. The film actually insults Vietnam by treating it as if it were some kind of traditional Vietnamese game and it is ridiculous how it is supported by an entire industry of gamblers who are eager to throw money at it even while Saigon is on the verge of being overrun. I simply cannot find it in me to like film when its core premise is so idiotic.

The whole debacle makes more sense once you learn that the original script had nothing to do with the Vietnam War at all. Instead it was something about gangsters in Las Vegas and the game of Russian roulette. The script was somehow rewritten to place it in Vietnam and the rest is history. It would be acceptable to me if they used the Russian roulette in a single scene for example but you can tell that this is really what the film is about from the beginning. That’s why I feel that Cimino accidentally lucked into a critical and commercial hit without really understanding what he was doing and was never able to replicate its success.