Why Are Movie Geeks Frothing At The Mouth Over Kevin Costner’s New Western, ‘Horizon: An American Saga’?

The trailer for Kevin Costner’s upcoming two-part, big-screen western Horizon: An American Saga is out, and the reactions from movie fans has been surprisingly rapturous, as if Costner getting back in the saddle may be as hotly anticipated a piece of nouveau-dad cinema as a new Michael Mann project or a Mission: Impossible movie. This must be especially vindicating for Costner (or would be, if he seemed likely to pay attention to online chatter), because for much of the 1990s, it felt as if he was willing to blow his movie-star goodwill on westerns, no matter how many of them it took.

Maybe he was emboldened by the surprise success of Dances with Wolves, at least initially. Costner’s feature directorial debut became an unlikely hit in the fall of 1990, grossing over $400 million worldwide – a major feat for a genre that hadn’t so much as cracked the year-end top ten in years, especially for a three-hour, action-light epic that (however clumsily at times) depicts its American Indian characters as sympathetic, with the American soldiers (minus Costner’s character, of course) as the villains of the piece.

The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture, as well as editing, writing, score, sound mixing, and cinematography. Costner himself won for Best Director, planting some seeds of discontent over the film’s place in history: Costner beat out Martin Scorsese and Goodfellas, therefore earning the lifetime ire of many film geeks. As the years went by, the reputation of Goodfellas only grew, and for some hardcore Scorsese fans, Costner (like Robert Redford, who directed Raging Bull-beater Ordinary People) became a double-threat dilletante who stole one of Marty’s much-deserved awards. (And it was harder to stay mad at Redford, the Sundance Film Festival founder, evergreen movie star, and filmmaker who actually cast Scorsese in his Quiz Show.)

As film geeks seethed, Costner also spent a good portion of the ’90s making his fixation on westerns look more quixotic. He reunited with Lawrence Kasdan for Wyatt Earp, a big-budget production that was thoroughly outshined by Tombstone beating it to release. His eventual directorial follow-up to Wolves was The Postman, which may not have been a traditional western, but felt very much like Costner trying for a do-over on Waterworld, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie with western overtones. With The Postman, would attempt another post-apocalyptic story, only with more western trappings and the self-seriousness that had become one of his calling cards. It also gave him an unwanted redo on Waterworld’s potential for hemorrhaging money; while the latter wound up avoiding utter box office disaster, The Postman crashed into it head-on. As the decade came to a close, it had been ten years since Dances with Wolves, and none of Costner’s successes since then had been westerns or, for that matter, self-directed.

He wasn’t yet done with the genre, however. One of his best-performing, and just plain best, movies of the 2000s was Open Range, an old-fashioned western that, like Wolves, moves at a leisurely pace – until its terrific climactic shoot-out, more exciting than anything in The Postman. In retrospect, it’s a little odd that Costner didn’t dip back to the genre again until the TV miniseries Hatfields & McCoys in 2012, which seemingly led to his work on Yellowstone, the extremely popular TV show that seems to have given him the juice to circle back to his longtime passion project Horizon (which, in turn, has curtailed his involvement in the show, which will end this year with his leaving).

It’s not that unusual for a filmmaker to benefit from the long view of his career, which probably accounts for the Horizon excitement. That, and the fact that despite the success of Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Tombstone, Open Range, True Grit, and Django Unchained, among others, westerns still don’t get made that often – they’re like musicals, in that they’ve somehow had something to prove just because they once fell out of the fashion in the 1970s. Horizon being the kind of two-part, big-budget commitment (with the possibility of additional “chapters” to come) often given to fantasy novels or other name-brand franchises feels like a victory for cinema, and if it coaxed Costner away from TV (where almost every star of his vintage has wound up at least part-time), all the better. Dances with Wolves is exactly the kind of adaptation that would probably get turned into a prestige TV series in the 2020s, and Horizon feels like an assurance that it’s not gonna go down like that.

Based on Costner’s previous westerns, Horizon will probably be slow, a little self-glorifying for its star, and squarely if handsomely shot, with an appropriate if old-fashioned sense of frontier grandeur. (It also seems to have surprisingly few Black characters for a story set so specifically in the aftermath of the Civil War.) In the scheme of his movie-star fixations, Costner has actually had more success recasting the sports picture in his image; Bull Durham and Tin Cup are more durable expressions of his ramshackle masculinity – parts that are more rascally Clark Gable than dependable Gary Cooper. Another Costner baseball movie might well inspire similar “we are so back” quips, but the solemn egotism that was long assigned to his westerns now feels like a weirdly precious commodity, just like legal thrillers, epic romances, and other types of entertainment that now require 10 hours of commitment and a streaming subscription to access. It’s like his character says in Dances with Wolves, explaining why he wants to take a remote post on the frontier: We want to see it before it’s gone.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.