It was the great American gamble. Kevin Costner’s epic Horizon: An American Saga has hit theaters and it certainly wants you to know that an edit button was never considered.
Clocking in at three hours and one minute (the same run-time as Oscar winner Dances with Wolves) and famously directed and acted by Kevin Costner, you feel every second of the runtime and with a movie of this length, it can’t feel this long. Just to give an example of great films that are over three hours long: The Wolf of Wall Street, Titanic and Lord of the Ring: Return of the King among others. The thing that makes these movies great is that they don’t feel like that long — they bounce from set piece to set piece with action, comedy and drama flawlessly. Horizon: An American Saga’s issue was that it goes from two people talking to two more people talking, but this time, in a different location.
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 Review
Horizon is set in the beginning of the Civil War and takes place across many territories of the Old West like Wyoming and Montana. Of the many storylines that you must follow, we start out in a settlement named Horizon that runs along a river providing seemingly good farmland and has been built up as a possible mining settlement. But these aren’t the first settlers that have tried to make this place home with Native Americans nearby, the camp is attacked and only few survive and the ones that do must relocate away from the purchased land of Horizon.
This is where we are introduced to Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) who along with her daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) are taken in by the US Calvary. Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington), Sgt. Major Riordan (Michael Rooker) and Colonel Houghton (Danny Huston) make up the leadership of the US Cavalry and deliver the mission statement for the film. Col. Houghton explains to his subordinates that people will continue to come to the West and regardless of the possible danger, they will keep coming. This is Costner’s north star for the film in every storyline depicting the unrelenting cruelty of the West. In an act of retribution, a faction of men join an Apache hunting party to track down the tribe that attacked the Horizon settlement as revenge for the loss of life there. But as many of these revenge rides do, it becomes more about gaining profits by collecting Native American scalps than seeking closure for the dead.
It takes about an hour before our main star makes his appearance on screen. Kevin Costner, who plays Hayes Ellison, rides into the frame looking more like Wyatt Earp than when he was in Wyatt Earp. It is clear that he is trying to emulate who John Wayne was in his later years in films like True Grit. He inserts himself in a storyline that involves a rich family on the search for a woman who took her child and ran away to a mining camp in Montana. That woman’s friend Marigold (Abbey Lee) gets tangled up in this and Ellison has to defend her against Caleb Sykes (Jamie Campbell Bower), who is devilishly evil. Costner is an undeniable presence in the film, but his time on screen is too sporadic. With there being three more chapters to this series, I’m sure he will become a more central figure, but in this film, I think audiences will be disappointed with the lack of screen time.
The final major storyline is a wagon train plowing west through the plains with Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) at the helm. Along with Owen Kittredge (Will Patton), the wagon train is the embodiment of America moving West. It shows the difficulties of life on the wagon trail and how some people were truly unprepared for the tough journey ahead. Wilson does a fine job as the gruff wagon leader, but for some reason, I just wasn’t totally bought in on the character. Patton, on the other hand, is superb as an older man with a family ready for life in the West. I’m most excited to see where this wagon train ends up at the end of the saga even though I know it will culminate at Horizon.
It is pitched as a throwback western filled with gunfights, wagon chases and sweeping shots of the shrinking American West. With all those possibilities, you would think it would be easy to piece together spaced-out sequences to keep the audience engaged. This is a film with fantastic moments — there is a gunfight where tension fills the room like a locomotive slowly leaving the station slowly building as it marches to full speed. A fantastic shot of a gunfighter in a water trough aiming his gun at an enemy gunfighter. A horse chase scene in the moonlight was a standout and reminded me of the exhilarating feeling I felt watching the buffalo hunt scene in Dances with Wolves. These outstanding moments were far and few between which was so disappointing.
The pacing and the direction are what is ultimately at fault here. There are four different storylines at play and Costner has stated multiple times in interviews that, “They all connect in the end.” The end is definitely not in Chapter 1 and I hate to say what everyone else is saying, but this feels like multiple episodes of a TV series. Costner could have chosen one storyline and made a film about it and instead, he decided to make four stories try to converge in this saga.
With so much dialogue in the film, it was a delight to have so many talented actors contributing to this epic. A real standout for me was Sienna Miller — she just seems to capture the ethos of a frontier woman. She is a strong character who is intuitive and understands the harsh world that she lives in. I think you can sense a real chemistry between her and Sam Worthington’s character, Lt. Gephart. This is the old-school Western at its heart and to me, this is the most interesting of the many convoluted storylines. Lt. Gephart’s dedication to duty and honor is what Westerns are all about. It’s hard to praise so many stellar performances but to highlight one more I really enjoyed the moments we got to spend with Caleb Sykes (Bower). There are many antagonists in the film, but none better than Sykes with the way that he always seems to be moving forward against forces standing in his way. He certainly is the archetype for a gunslinging bad guy, but that’s why we love westerns, they create good guys and bad guys and he is a bad guy in the most sinister way.
I do take issue with Costner’s depiction of the Native Americans. If this was another filmmaker, maybe I would give more leeway for a pretty one-dimensional depiction of Native Americans in the West. But, Costner doesn’t really have an excuse here — he directed Dances with Wolves and has been part of the Yellowstone universe for the better part of five years. This also comes down to a simple storytelling technique. The film goes directly from settlers surveying the ground at Horizon, Native Americans observing them, the settlement being built and then a massive fight where many settlers lost their lives. Then, at that point, he shows us a tribal meeting where they explain their reasoning for attacking the settlement. If you simply put this scene before the massacre, it creates a more well-rounded depiction of why Native Americans could be so hostile to English settlers.
I watched Horizon in a full theater packed to the gills at 3 p.m. on a Thursday. Most of the audience was in their 60s and 70s and almost all were the target demographic for Kevin Costner. The good thing is that I’m curious about what happens in Chapter 2, but I fear that Costner may not finish his American Saga. I think that there were many scenes that could have been cut and I’m the first person to say give me more movie. We just had a Western in Killers of the Flower Moon that was three and a half hours and I never felt like time was dragging. Horizon requires such patience that it continues to beg the question if anything is ever going to happen. I love Westerns and I think it is the cornerstone of basic film storytelling and Horizon is a perfect example that the American West is beautiful and we love seeing it this way. But without a focused story, it can feel like a never-ending odyssey that you can’t escape.
— Written by VSiN’s Brian Ortega