‘Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1’ Review: Kevin Costner Flattens the American West with the Dullest Cinematic Vanity Project of the Century
Editor’s Note: This review originally ran during the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Warner Bros. releases “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1” in theaters on June 28.
Good luck to you and all who plod along dusty roads with you if the first chapter of Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga” compels you to seek out the forthcoming second one. This Civil War-era, Old West expansion epic is a $100 million vanity project that finds the actor/filmmaker in familiar terrain, and with the gall to cast himself as an apparently swoon-inducing cowboy in a world where all the women are either ball busters, prostitutes, or profoundly stupid, and the men hayseeds or Great American Heroes.
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Told across four interwoven tales in and around the territories that became Wyoming, Montana, and Kansas, “Horizon” gets its title from a fictional pioneer settlement in the 1860s that’s stomped out an Apache tribe now battling to get back their land. But their patted-on inclusion at all feels more like a committee-driven, gun-to-the-head corrective rather than an organic necessity of the story. Costner is far more interested in the prosaic plights of the white settlers — and ultimately in himself — than the cultures they erased.
Costner is fully in traditionalist mode here, painting a quote-unquote sweeping American saga that feels like an expensive miniseries compressed into feature form. “Chapter 1” even ends with a kind of “and on next week’s episode” montage anticipating moments from the second installment, ending on the face of — I’ll just tell you — Giovanni Ribisi. Costner and Jon Baird’s schematic and digressive screenplay from a story created with Mark Kasdan jumps from the settlers to Unionists (though the Civil War is more far-off backdrop than factor here) and occasionally the First Nationers, spreading itself too thin across a sprawling cast.
The film begins in 1859 San Pedro Valley, where the beginnings of a white settlement are discovered by Indigenous brothers Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) and Taklishim (Tatanka Means), its surveyors later found dead with an ominous warning from the Natives. “Horizon” then flings us to Montana territory, where woman-of-the-woods Lucy (Jena Malone) shoots a man dead in the chest and runs off with his small blond-haired child. Mrs. Sykes (Dale Dickey), the dead man’s mother, dispatches her sons Caleb (Jamie Campbell Bower) and Junior (Job Beavers) to retrieve the child. Back at Horizon, Pionsenay and Taklishim lead a conflagration of the homesteader’s settlement in a sequence thrilling enough to make you almost wish there were more violent set pieces that followed rather than the bland domestic dramas that do.
After hiding out below the floorboards of her family’s pillaged shack, Frances (Sienna Miller) emerges with her daughter to a raiding party sent by the Union to survey the damage and destroy any Native Americans getting in the way of their manifest destiny. They include First Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington), whom the now-widowed Frances has a schoolgirl crush on, emerging swiftly and unscathed from her grief. At one point she hides behind a tree to avoid Gephardt, fixing her hair and all but checking her makeup before staging an impromptu run-in. Poor Sienna Miller gets nothing to work with other than a few ready-to-wear shawls and chunky belts.
Strolling into the movie is Costner himself as Hayes Ellison, a lone wolf who somehow catches the eye of prostitute Marigold (Abbey Lee). When not turning tricks, Marigold, shoving herself into slatternly bustiers, tends to the kid Lucy stole. Lucy also goes by Ellen now, and is married to the kindly Walter Childs (Michael Angarano). Things don’t end well for him once trigger-happy moron Caleb shows up to reclaim the child. But Caleb is screwed once Hayes, a taciturn marksman and the prevailing moral center of the movie, steps into frame. These aren’t characters so much as the spokes of a plot in human form, each of their storylines moving as if being pulled by horses across the entire span of the American West.
There are other storylines I’m leaving out, but who cares with a screenplay so scattered that the wires get more tangled as it unfolds. It’s all a haze as “Horizon” lurches toward not a conclusion and not even its halfway point, as Costner wants to film two more parts in addition to the finished two. The most risible of the film’s many strands is Hayes’ relationship, let’s call it, with Marigold, who looks at him with inexplicable doe-eyed interest but doesn’t have a clue how disinterested in sex he is. At one point, she listlessly rides him as Hayes fades into a stupor, the child asleep next to them. And this is not the first time today Marigold has fucked in that tent in front of the kid.
Elsewhere, the cavalry sent to post-massacre Horizon that includes Lt. Gephardt is headed up by Colonel Houghton. He’s played by Danny Huston, the great character actor ever capable of elevating literally any project he’s in except for this one. Houghton exists as the mollifying mouthpiece of the film’s thin stance toward the Indigenous, explaining to the raiders why the Apaches ought to be so pissed off in the first place. Even Costner’s Best Picture-winning “Dances with Wolves,” made more than three decades ago, offered a more rounded portrayal of Native Americans than what’s afforded here, and that other three-hour epic was also more about Costner (he’ll admit this) than anything else. The Natives are at first cartoonishly villainized in that opening ambush, however well-staged and expensive-looking it is, only for the movie to slowly start to unpack how the attack is a response to the taking of ancestral lands.
Another strand of “Horizon” introduces a why-am-I-here Luke Wilson as wagon train leader Matthew Van Weyden, shepherding his troop through harsh conditions and supply shortages. Among his cavalcade are harebrained British couple Juliette (Ella Hunt) and Hugh (Tom Payne). Juliette makes herself the target of some prurient youths when she takes a sensuous sponge bath al fresco, basically stopping short of jerking it right then and there in another of the film’s objectifying snippets of homespun women. And snippets only they are.
“Horizon” is shot handsomely with a capital H by J. Michael Muro with the aspect ratio and camera placement of a high-budget television series. Which, along with the movie’s clumsy episodic structure, leads you to believe that Costner may have been trying to out-Taylor Sheridan Taylor Sheridan, the “Yellowstone” showrunner he’s rumored to have drama with as the show supposedly readies for return sans Costner. Costner’s vainglorious efforts in crafting a sincere Western opus he poured much of his own money into are commendable mainly for what he’s put on the line here. But “Horizon” makes even that other $100-million-plus vanity project at Cannes — Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” — look like a work of uninhibited genius by comparison.
Grade: C-
After premiering at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1” opens June 28 from Warner Bros., with “Chapter 2” to follow August 16.
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