The first season of Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon: An American Saga’ bodes poorly for Seasons 2, 3 and 4
Thirty-four years ago, Kevin Costner launched a corny, stirring, and uncultured Western drama Dance with the wolves. It would go on to win numerous Oscars, including a directing award for Costner. That success seemed to herald the arrival of the new actor-turned-director, both years earlier. Clint Eastwood won an Oscar for unforgivable. But director Costner’s sequel, The postman, rang out just once; it was a costly failure that kept Costner out of the director’s chair for nearly a decade. He then returns to form, on a smaller scale, because Open rangebefore falling asleep again.
However, in recent years, Costner has enjoyed a resurgence as an actor in a series of hit neo-Western films. Golden stone. This, in turn, gave him the cachet to once again revisit the open skies and guns blazing of his favorite genre. He dropped out of the movie (due to various scheduling reasons, it has been reported) and must work on Horizon: An American Storya four-part epic that one hopes will be the kind of sweeping, anachronistic movie event (of a genre other than superheroes or sci-fi) that almost doesn’t exist anymore.
Chapter 1 of Horizon line premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which seems like a good omen. Surely this massive, epic festival will only release a quality film — it may be a little cheesy, but there’s nothing wrong with that if done well. But unfortunately, Horizon line far from dignified, not even coherent. A jumble of clichéd plots rendered in washed-out colors (and lackluster performances), Horizon line can compete Megalopolis like America’s biggest joke at Cannes this year. Sure, what seems like chaos can turn into genius when we see the end of the project—but ten hours is an extremely long time to wait to find the answer.
The strangest, most astonishing thing about the movie is that it It doesn’t feel like a movie at all. Costner, who co-wrote the script with Jon Baird, introduces us to a television season’s worth of characters and plot threads. He jumps from one location to another, as much as Game of Thrones do. Yet Costner never lets us feel the enormous connection between these stories. They play as distractions to each other, intruding when something else might be available, might be about to find some traction. The film ends with a clip reel of scenes from the sequel, as if to entice us to watch more scenes. But despite the first chapter’s three-hour runtime, we still don’t have the space to care about what’s being teased. The writing and direction are so erratic and confusing that it’s nearly impossible to figure out who some of the characters are, let alone what they’re trying to accomplish.
As I see it, the three central stories concern the ragtag townspeople of a settlement in the San Pedro River valley (called Horizon); a gruff gunman traversing the mountains further north with a woman and child; and a Santa Fe Trail wagon train moving toward Horizon. (I think?) There is a fourth, reluctant theme, of divisions within the Apache tribes, who originated in the territory on which Horizon was hastily built. But the film only pays lip service to them. Most of them act as brutal antagonists of the townspeople of Horizon, who are nearly wiped out in a nighttime raid, one of the film’s very few action scenes — the rest is the most boring and hoarse part of speaking.
