What is Horizon? It’s a question that plagues the sprawling cast of characters in Kevin Costner’s new Western saga, his return to feature filmmaking after staking out a healthy retirement fund (and keeping himself in the public eye of America’s dads) with five seasons on Paramount’s popular neo-Western soap Yellowstone. Most of them, one way or another, have been drawn West with the promise of prosperity thanks to mysterious flyers published nationwide; settlers, homesteaders, and forty-niners all rush out there to find their future and their fortune. But, as with so many tales of the frontier, down this way lies danger: Apaches, privateers, the shadows of your past following you into the unknown seeking vengeance. Horizon, it seems, is the intangible dream of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, the romantic core of this nation’s history (and the brutal underbelly of violence that created it).
But it’s also important to ask what Horizon is for Costner, especially in the context of this first chapter: Part 1, a three-hour prologue that sets up what could be up to three chapters to come but which gives audiences little to grab onto in that lengthy time period. Much like Dune: Part One before it, it’s hard to gauge a film’s merits when its story is incomplete by its very nature. Comparisons to “How the West Was Won” have been made, but it also evokes the epic miniseries events of the 1970s and 1980s like Lonesome Dove and The Blue and the Grey, multi-night appointment viewing that told novelistic stories with lavish production values. “Horizon” most echoes these in its structure, a TV-etic format that seems oddly fitting for Costner’s return to film after so much time in the TV landscape himself.
But Part 1‘s greatest asset (and hurdle) comes from its opening act, the inciting incident for much of the plot’s primary thrust. 1859, the San Pedro Valley; a group of settlers put down stakes and form a small tent city, complete with loving families and even a bustling dance hall. Tragically, this bliss is interrupted by a raiding party of Apaches, angry at the “white-eyes” stealing their land, a forty-minute sequence as brutal as it is terrifying. This is the Costner of Dances With Wolves, in all its power and old-fashioned attitudes: scenes full of Western grandeur, yet suffused with an exoticism of Native peoples that hasn’t quite updated to the modern day.
Most of the settlers are killed; the few who survive are met by a corps of Army soldiers, led by dashing, sympathetic Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington), who questions why they were even there in the first place and hazards them against staying. “What you build, they will burn down,” he warns, and not without sympathy for the Apaches. Still, while he brings the two surviving members of the Kittridge family — newly widowed Frances (Sienna Miller) and daughter Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail) — to the safety of an Army posting, other survivors chase off to hunt down the Apaches behind the attack.
It’s a whole hour in before we finally see Costner sidle up on screen, now confident he’s laid the groundwork for the saga to come. He plays Hayes Ellison, a stoic drifter who sidles into a Wyoming trade town and ends up insinuating himself in the affairs of a sex worker named Marigold (Abbey Lee), who winds up on the run from bad folks chasing after her sister (Jena Malone). Not long after that, we zip to the Sante Fe Trail, where a wagon train led by irascible cowpoke Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) navigates threats and tensions both inside and outside the group.
None of these characters gets much time to grow amid Part 1‘s packed real estate; Costner’s instinct to soak us in a single narrative thread for its first hour is well-intentioned (getting us settled into an inciting incident and seeing it ripple out from there), but it also stalls our ability to meet many of the characters we’re meant to get to know and love/hate for the course of this saga. Costner feels like he’s barely in his own picture, not just due to Hayes’ laconicism but his sheer lack of screentime. Characters and threads, including more than one romantic subplot, get one mere scene to breathe before presumably paying it off in future chapters.
This shortfall of development is most acute with its Native characters, who get barely any time to breathe outside the immediate aftermath of the film’s opening attack. While Costner isn’t exactly up to the levels of visibility of something like Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s a game effort to follow his horror-film framing of Apaches as monsters with a sympathetic perspective, spinning said massacre as an unsanctioned gambit by a headstrong son of the tribe’s chief. But, like so many of the other characters, we get just a scene or two before Costner has to flit away to the next arm of his ever-expanding hydra, struggling to keep all the plates spinning.
Granted, the plates look gorgeous as they spin; J. Michael Munro leverages his wider, 1.85:1 frame to capture the vast expanses and mountain ranges of the Old West, and the costumes and score do well to evoke character in a story that has little time to show them to us through script and performance. Still, there remains a prestige-miniseries sheen to the proceedings, which either speaks to the limitations of digital filmmaking (one wonders how stunning Horizon would look shot on 35mm) or the increasingly “cinematic” nature of most prestige Westerns. It’s odd to watch Horizon and be impressed, yet think The English made the West look even more romantic.
Part 1 ends with a five-minute tease of the intrigue to come in future chapters: flashes of action, romance, and beautiful Western vistas, all set to the most bombastic segment of John Debney’s sweeping score. It stirs the blood, which is a welcome change from the airiness of the film we’ve seen up to this point. Here’s hoping that Costner has set sufficient groundwork to expand his saga of the American West and the blood-soaked romance of its conquering; this way, Part 2 and beyond can hit the ground running with energy that this prologue sorely lacks.
Horizon: An American Saga – Part I is currently in theaters.