Film Review: "Horizon: An American Saga--Chapter 1"

Kevin Costner's newest epic western is a frustratingly scattered and narratively incoherent spectacle.

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If you know anything about me and my film tastes, you no doubt know that the epic–in all of its many forms–is one of my favorite genres. There’s just something innately exhilarating about the way that epic articulates its vision of the past, sweeping me up in all of its majesty and scope and spectacle. There’s certainly no shortage of all of these things in Horizon: An American Story–Chapter 1, the newest film directed by Kevin Costner (who also helped to finance the project and co-wrote the screenplay with Jon Baird). What there isn’t, however, is anything resembling a coherent story. Indeed, despite its sprawling three-hour run time Horizon never really manages to come together as a story of its own and instead feels like the leadup to something bigger, grander, and far more compelling. 

It would be rather difficult to give a summary of this film, which has so many competing storylines that it’s hard to know just which ones are supposed to be the center of our attention. Suffice it to say that the action all revolves around the frontier town of Horizon, which acts as a synecdoche for America’s westward expansion and all that this entails. There are raids by Indigenous people that are startlingly brutal and visceral in their intensity and explicitness, there are rebellious women who are chased down by vengeful sons seeking to avenge the humiliation  of their fathers and, of course, there’s a romance between a widowed frontierswoman and a cavalry officer. Lastly, there’s also Kevin Costner himself, a horse trader character whose fate becomes intertwined with that of a sex worker and a young child.

Now, it has to be said that the performances in Horizon are impeccable. Sienna Miller is suitably matronly-but-beautiful as Frances Kittredge, whose husband and son perish in the Indigenous raid on Horizon, and there’s palpable chemistry between her and Sam Worthington’s First Lt. Trent Gephardt. Danny Huston has a nice bit of gravitas in the walk-on part of Col. Albert Houghton, who gives a nice soliloquy about the inevitability of manifest destiny. Jamie Campbell Bower is suitably chilling and deranged as Caleb Sykes, the young man who goes out in pursuit of the woman who shot his father, only to himself fall to the gun Kevin Costner’s Hayes Ellison. Costner is, of course, the true highlight, both because he’s the director and because he’s arguably his generation’s most fitting avatar of the western aesthetic.

Yet there’s also something a little strange about Costner's character, in that he doesn’t seem to be the most important figure in this drama or even a particularly important one. His seemingly ancillary relationship to the rest of the stories playing out is part of the film’s overall problem of guiding the viewer through these various people and their relationships, both to one another and to the film as a whole. Because we’re never really allowed to spend all that much time with any group of characters, we don’t get particularly attached to them, at least not to the degree that we should given that the film is three hours long.

Then there’s the politics of the whole thing. I don’t think you need me to tell you that the western has a long and very troubled history with the representation of Indigenous people (that’s putting it mildly, obviously). Though this has obviously changed over the years, the genre as a whole still struggles to break out of the old mold in which Indigenous people are a violent threat to both Whiteness and to the formation of a unified America. We do get some welcome insight into the motivations of characters like Pionsenay, the young warrior who leads the brutal raid. However, given the extent to which the viewer has already been led to be emotionally invested in the White characters and their struggles, this is all a little too little, too late, particularly since there just isn't enough emotional weight given to their struggles and conflicts to make them feel even close to as meaningful as their White counterparts. 

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Horizon is boring, but it is a frustrating viewing experience. The various storylines and pieces work on their own, and sometimes they work quite well, evoking the emotions that you’d expect from a western like this one. Moreover, it does have some thoughtful things to say about the way in which the American West became a flashpoint of competing ideologies and peoples, a seething cauldron of emotions and violence and blood and sweat. 

The whole time I was watching it I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching the first episode of a sprawling epic TV series more than a movie. Part of this is that there are already several announced sequels–one of which has already been pulled from the August release schedule due to this film’s abysmal performance at the box office. It’s hard to feel that you’ve had a truly rewarding and satisfying movie experience when you know what you’ve just seen is a prelude. This impression certainly isn’t helped by the fact that the last five minutes or so of the film is a sizzle reel showcasing the adventures to come. Unless I’m very much mistaken, some of this footage was used in the footage for this film, so you can imagine my annoyance that I was being doubly misled.  

Thus, it’s easy to see how this story would play out much more cogently on the small screen. Yes, we’d lose some of the awe-inspiring imagery at which Horizon no doubt excels, but personally I would rather trade off some of the visual spectacle for a story that at least makes some sort of sense and holds together. No matter how much Costner might want this epic to play out on the big screen, it simply doesn’t make a whole lot of narrative sense as it’s been presented to us. We can but hope that the rest of the films–whether they make it to a theater or find some other kind of distribution–help to make this into the story it so clearly wants to be.