Critics get a lot of guff for being negative all the time, especially when confronted with a movie like Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, Kevin Costner’s opening installment of an epic Western saga he self-financed for a whole lot of money.
At three hours and one minute, just this first part of Horizon is a whole lot of movie, a sprawling narrative that takes place all over the United States (west of the Mississippi, that is). For many of the (non-Native) characters, they’re hoping to find a new settlement called Horizon, in the Southern California area. For everyone, though, there’s only one real goal: survival.
Horizon’s first chapter, following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, has received less than glowing reviews: The Los Angeles Times critic Katie Walsh called it “a massive boondoggle, a misguided and excruciatingly tedious cinematic experience. That Costner has promised three more installments feels like a threat.”
Having seen this first chapter on the big screen, as God and Costner intended, I confess that I may agree with the critical majority on its problems. I have, however, done my best to come up with the below positive notes about the film. Nine of them!
01. It Doesn’t Feel Quite as Long as You’d Think
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (Warner Bros.)
During my screening, I spent a fair amount of time mentally pumping myself up like I would while on a long run, with thoughts like, “We’re definitely at least half an hour in by now,” “Really, it’s just like watching three episodes of an HBO drama, no big deal,” and “This has to be the halfway point.” (I could have sneakily checked my phone to track our progress, but that felt like cheating.)
Just a few minutes after I’d told myself, “We’ve got to be at least two hours in,” a montage arrived that can only be described as “Next time, on Horizon…” And then, after that extended tease of events to come, the credits!
In all honesty, because there are so many storylines happening at once in Horizon, there’s rarely a moment that feels stagnant. The downside is that because so much is happening with minimal context, very few of these moments land with enough emotional resonance to make an impact on the viewer, beyond whatever short-term emotions might be summoned. There’s one exception to this…
02. The Opening Sequence Is Pretty Solid
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (Warner Bros.)
Horizon essentially kicks off with an introduction to a rural settlement that’s enjoying a nice evening of music and dancing — until later that night, when Native raiders attack, in a brutal extended battle that leaves a lot of people dead. From the rampage that destroys the camp to the siege of a nearby cabin, Costner delivers some well-executed action and drama, with a few surprising moments.
03. I Really Was Surprised by This!
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (Warner Bros.)
Did I expect desperate settlers in a tent (including children) to literally blow up their tent (including the children) during the middle of that raid? I did not! And yet that happened!
04. The Faces of the Actors
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (Warner Bros.)
There are some incredible faces featured in this film, a true testament to casting team April Webster, Angela Young, and Jeff Johnson. With a cast this big, after all, the viewer needs to be able to tell people apart with relative ease, which can be a challenge given the constraints of period garb and facial hair. Still, look at the shots above of Owen Crow Shoe, Jamie Campbell Bower, Isabelle Fuhrman, and Michael Rooker — they’re distinct and unique-looking individuals, all of whom fit nicely into this Western world.
Most importantly: The vast majority of the cast manages to avoid looking like they’ve ever seen a cell phone.
05. The Character of Marigold
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (Warner Bros.)
As mentioned, there are a lot of great faces in this movie. However, most characters in Horizon don’t really count as characters, per se. They certainly lack any of the definition you might associate with fully-realized individuals whose welfare would be of interest to audiences. The one major exception is Marigold, played by Abbey Lee; as the resident sex worker in a rural settlement Costner’s Hayes Ellison stops by, she’s got actual goals and an independent spirit to set her apart from everyone else just drudging along.
The downside is that Marigold is weirdly fixated on sleeping with Hayes even after the two of them have to go on the run together, and most of her spirit’s gone well before the end of Chapter 1 through sheer inertia. (It doesn’t help that Hayes is a total blank slate of a character, completely without definition, since Costner doesn’t make any choices that would make him feel like an actual person.) Point is, at her best, Marigold was at least interesting. There’s a reason she’s the only character name I didn’t have to look up to write this.
06. Jena Malone Is Also Great!
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (Warner Bros.)
Like everyone else in this cast, she doesn’t get a whole lot to do, but as an abused wife who decides she’s had enough, the Donnie Darko and Hunger Games star is a real spitfire in her scenes, even when things take a dark turn for her and her family.
07. There’s Romance!
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (Warner Bros.)
Well, okay, not a lot of it. And really all it is is the widowed Frances (Sienna Miller) and soldier Trent (Sam Worthington) making eyes at each other in a longing way from a distance. It at least breaks up the many many scenes of casual cruelty that occur.
08. The Civil War Backdrop Is an Intriguing One
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 (Warner Bros.)
There have been a number of Westerns set during the years 1861-1865 — including Costner’s own Dances with Wolves. But if nothing else, the sprawl of Horizon means that there’s a lot of potential for exploring the impact of the war far from the front lines. What is it like to live in a country at war with itself, when news can take weeks, maybe months to arrive? Definitely an interesting question to explore, especially if Costner is able to make the third and fourth parts of this series happen. (Chapter 2 has already been filmed.)
09. It Would Be Better as a TV Show
Costner says he first had the idea for Horizon in 1988, well before the rise of prestige TV. However, he hasn’t expressed any real anti-TV snobbery lately, especially given his success with Yellowstone; while he has now officially left the show, all his frustrations with that series today seem based on the people in charge, not the medium itself.
Horizon does feature some beautiful sweeping big-screen cinematography, with lots of Western vistas getting the Glamour Shots treatment. But the scale of this project, especially the number of stories Costner and co-writer Jon Baird are trying to tell all at once, cries out for the real estate offered by a multi-episode, multi-season television series. Maybe it could be structured so that individual stories are the focus of individual episodes — the Wagon Train gang, for instance, getting their own installment, followed by an update on whatever Hayes and Marigold are up to. Maybe it would continue the intercutting. No matter what, it’d probably work better.
Again, the biggest issue with this film is that in its rush to tell all these stories, it doesn’t have time for the kinds of nuanced moments that make characters feel alive and real. Chapter 2, set to premiere on August 16th, has a runtime of two hours and 45 minutes — this means the first two parts combined are 345 minutes. Divide by 60, and you’re looking at 5.75 episodes of television already. Expand out to eight episodes, using all that footage Costner had to cut to get these movies to be as “short” as they are… and maybe you’ve actually got something that audiences can engage with.
Maybe this last point’s not as nice as it could have been.
Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1 is in theaters now.