Kevin Costner has never been one to be shy about his ambitious filmmaking, but it’s been met with mixed results. When he succeeds, he strikes cinematic gold, as in the case of Dances With Wolves. When he fails, he’s accused of making vanity projects such as Waterworld and The Postman.
His latest movie, Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1, which he stars in, co-wrote, and co-produced, is intended to be the first installment of a Western epic. It proves that Costner is setting his sights high once again. The results are both pretty and pretentious.
The movie takes place in 1859 and centers around a series of characters with multiple storylines as they’re all searching for a peaceful land known as Horizon. Costner plays Hayes Ellison, who is wandering across America when he encounters a sassy hooker named Marigold (Abbey Lee) and her son. She persuades Ellison to take them along with him.
Another storyline involves an Apache tribe attacking a group of settlers. Sam Worthington plays an Army lieutenant who offers to give the settlers sanctuary at his base. The Army decides to chase after the Apaches, and there’s a love story of some kind brewing between the lieutenant and a woman named Frances (Sierra Miller).
Costner certainly knows how to make the Western frontier look impressive, thanks to some terrific cinematography by J. Michael Miro. The landscapes are admittedly brimming with life as Costner and Miro give an uncanny resemblance to the Westerns of the past.
There is no doubt Costner has a gifted eye in that department, but he fails to find a focus or motivation for the rest of the film. This is a three-hour epic that is disjointed and meandering every step of the way.
Costner loves to bog down in too much dialogue for most of the runtime with the occasional battle sequence or some other kind of Western violence to shake things up a bit, but more of that would’ve been a good idea. The movie is talky and bloated, and it’s more likely to bore its target audience than entertain them.
Plus, the editing is incredibly choppy during the battle scenes in which there’s no real sense of who is being killed, and it’s mostly in the dark, which is even more frustrating.
As mentioned, this is the first in a series, with Chapter 2 scheduled for release on August 16, but it’ll be impossible to find anyone eagerly anticipating it.
Horizon: An American Saga is shaping up to be an ambitious yet clunky misfire.
Grade: C-
(Rated R for violence, some nudity and sexuality.)
