Michael Cimino’s 1980 film Heaven’s Gate, an extravagantly beautiful mega-Western about a little-known range war in 19th-century Wyoming, has gone down in history not for its beauty but for its extravagance.

Treating Heaven’s Gate more like a work in progress than a historic artifact, Cimino has substantially changed the original look of the film, using a digital color process to scrub the original of its yellowish-brown sepia tones. Frame for frame, the restored Heaven’s Gate rivals any motion picture ever made for sheer pictorial beauty. Or rather, cinematic beauty: Though virtually every frame could stand alone as a painting, Cimino’s camera is in perpetual motion, twirling around dancers and (in the film’s most magical scene) roller skaters, craning up and over the edges of buildings, barreling through battlegrounds.

On a purely sensory level, Heaven’s Gate is overpowering. Everything it gives you, it gives you in excess, beginning with the pageantry of the nearly 20-minute prologue, which imagines the lavish graduation ceremonies of the Harvard Class of 1870 (though the scenes were filmed on the even posher grounds of Oxford University). This extended sequence accomplishes virtually nothing to further the movie’s story—all we really learn is that two of the young graduates, James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) and Billy Irvine (John Hurt), are friends who like to get drunk and dance with pretty girls. But the unhurried, magisterial opening scenes show us everything we need to know about the world of complacent privilege Billy and Averill are set to inherit. The outdoor dance scene that ends this chapter, with waltzing couples circling around a grassy lawn to the music of Strauss as the camera loops and swirls around them, is a masterpiece of camerawork and choreography, a Renoir painting come to exuberant life.

From Harvard in 1870, we shift to Wyoming 20 years later, where Averill has become the marshal of a county troubled by land disputes between wealthy ranchers and immigrant settlers from Germany and Eastern Europe. The head of the cattle barons’ organization (Sam Waterston) proposes a grim solution: a “death list” of names, to be picked off by hired mercenaries—among them a very young and spectral-looking Christopher Walken. Walken’s character, Nate Champion, is in love with the local madam, Ella (Isabelle Huppert.) But Ella—an independent spirit with a taste for fast horses and free love—can’t seem to choose between the devoted Nate and the standoffish Averill. Meanwhile, the situation in Johnson County disintegrates from civil unrest to outright war, culminating in a staggering two-part battle sequence, Tolstoyan in its sweep.