Kevin Costner’s admittedly bold choice to release his apparent magnum opus Horizon: An American Saga in two parts was a mistake. Costner has spent a lot of the last decade working in television -big-budget television but television nonetheless- and hasn’t directed a movie since Open Range more than twenty years ago. And it has had an effect on his approach to Horizon, a sprawling western epic with a cast of dozens that seems to be trying to be at least a little bit of every kind of western movie there is. It is scripted and structured like a television series which is a problem when presented in the format of a feature. And it is only exacerbated by Costner’s sheer abundance of ambition and indulgence, which struggles to be supported even by the film’s three-hour runtime.
It’s scope is reminiscent of a couple other famous western epics -How the West Was Won, which told the history of westward expansion across a century from the point of view of a single family over generations; and the infamous box office catastrophe Heaven’s Gate, the massive odyssey about land disputes in the Wyoming territory. Both movies had their share of faults, and Horizon has inherited a bulk of them, starting with its unwieldy focus.
There’s about six or seven storylines here, some intersecting, others left to do so for Part Two, but generally all based around the periphery of a town called Horizon in the San Pedro Valley, established in spite of its infringing on the territory of the Apache. Only about a generation after its founding it is raided by an Apache war party, torching it to the ground. From this, the primary narratives focus on Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller), one of the survivors, and the idealistic Union officer Lt. Gephard (Sam Worthington) tasked with the recovery -and the inklings of a romance between the two; as well as a storyline out in Wyoming Territory centred on Costner’s cowboy Hayes Ellison, who gets involved in a skirmish with a violent family tracking down the baby who was stolen when their patriarch was murdered. There’s also threads centred on a wagon train to Horizon commanded by Luke Wilson, conflicts within the Apache over how to respond to the colonizers, and the band of hunters from Horizon looking to enact vengeance and make a profit. And each of these stories come with several point-of-view characters the film hones in on as though it were Game of Thrones.
But unlike Game of Thrones, there isn’t nearly enough investment built up, certainly not in the time allotted -which is substantial. Some of them, like Gregory Cruz’s war-averse Apache elder or Will Patton’s illiterate wagon hand or Jeff Fahey’s bloodthirsty tracker, have the bones of interesting characters to them, but the film can only give them limited attention as it cuts between several others. And there are genuinely fascinating figures around, like Michael Rooker’s Union officer, a sidekick to Gephard, and Abbey Lee’s sex worker Marigold, deeply attracted to Hayes and who gets wrapped up in his flight; or of course any of the Apache characters whose world and motives are by far the most compelling and yet get the least amount of screen-time of the major players. Even these are still characters waiting in the wings for much of the movie for the hint of interesting plot developments, and in some cases, they just meander. There are little comic scenes for Rooker for example that definitely feel inefficient, stretching out and halting the momentum to a movie that was supposedly too important and expansive to be confined to a single feature.
And because Costner structures the narrative in the idea of an overarching whole, nothing to this movie feels in any way complete or autonomous. It functions purely as set-up, without any kind of satisfactory resolution to its plot points or themes. And the narrative trajectory is dismally slow as a result -in a way it wouldn’t had Costner simply committed to this as a miniseries. A certain degree of vanity can be presumed in its being produced this way, and the fact that Costner had envisioned it initially as a movie since way back in the 90s. But it appears that television has completely changed how he approaches storytelling -and there’s a reason the mediums are separate, in spite of all the popular talk of big-budget serialized shows being just ’10-hour movies’. If Costner wanted to make a 10-hour movie, more power to him, but the format he chose instead only heightens the valleys any sustained narrative starting out is likely to hit, with few of the peaks.
The breadth of his aims also hurts the movie, as he appears to try and nail every subgenre of classical western film -the outlaw movie, the wagon-train voyage, the frontier romance, and of course “Cowboys and Indians”. This latter piece naturally comes with a fair bit of baggage, as Costner illustrates the Apache raid with intense severity as to the Apache methods and viciousness. It could almost be a lost scene from The Searchers, it so primes the pump for a bigot’s vendetta of revenge. Costner historically has a good relationship with Indigenous people and issues going back to Dances with Wolves, and he does endeavour to temper this depiction somewhat with a sympathetic image of some of the Apache and frequent reminders that the settlement should not have been founded in the first place given how obvious it was that the land was marked for the Natives. But it also feels like he’s trying to have his cake and eat it, to remake a classical image of the Old West, with slight but ultimately toothless criticism of manifest destiny -while subtly romanticizing it at the same time.
This is clear in the reverence with which he shoots the movie, from the lush open expanses to the earnest tranquillity of the village -many scenes that emphasize a kind of glory in the gradual conquest of the land, often set to a sweeping score by John Debney that is grossly overwrought, or otherwise attempting to brazenly manipulate your emotions by suggesting more depth than is there. Costner certainly imbues the film with an authentic sense of grit, but he doesn’t successfully recontextualize this world, so preoccupied as he is with rendering its popular veneer. It is altogether a very hollow film.
Yet there is certainly craft at play, Costner’s belonging to an old school tradition advantageous in at least this respect. The raid sequence is executed terrifically from a technical standpoint, the action never feeling obscured or unbelievable. The cinematography is often rather nice, in part due to its picturesque proclivities, but also its creativity of frame. Each shot is considered with cinematic expression. Additionally, some scenes do build effective drama and the inklings of effective character. And several of the performances are very good, including Lee and Jena Malone as the escaped mother of the baby, Danny Huston as the military commander, Fahey in his unconscionable pathology, and Jamie Campbell Bower as a reckless gunman.
In spite of everything, I do admire just a little bit the experiment here. This is an original epic western released in the bold format often reserved for major franchises. Costner has willed Horizon into a franchise of its own. But it’s not a well-conceived one, and does not work cinematically through this structure. There’s promise to the varying storylines and characters, but that’s hardly praise given how much time is spent merely establishing them, adding details but not dimension, and leaving it for another film to carry the burden of deliverance. The ambition on display is not enough, and in a sense it dooms its successor. Even if the second half of the Horizon saga fulfils these narratives to satisfaction, it will still lack fullness and be weighed down by this instalment’s deficiencies. A poor start of a passion project.
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