If you want to understand just how dumbed-down American Culture is, you need to watch Heaven's Gate. It first shows you just how limiting the standard 90-minute to 2-hour format really is. Of course, 10 years after Heaven's Gate, 3-hour movies became all the rage after the release of Dances with Wolves (which was a simplistic and complete misappropriation of its source material), and now they are de rigeur. But few use the time to explore their topics in more depth or with more sophistication. Heaven's Gate will show you what cinema could be.