Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter I
Kevin Costner’s epic, brutal, female-centric Western demands to be seen on the big screen – while it’s still in cinemas.
Sienna Miller, Georgia MacPhail and Michael Rooker
Photo by Richard Foreman, Image courtesy of Warner Bros.
The horizon stretches as far as the eye can see. In the foreground of a tabletop plateau, a surveyor is hammering a stake into the ground. He gestures at a young boy in spectacles, presumably his son, to position a post in exactly the right place. A caption tells us that this is the San Pedro Valley in 1859, and as it does so the camera pulls back to reveal the long-haired heads of two onlookers perched on an overhanging bluff. The older Apache boy shakes his head disconsolately, knowing of the inevitable circumstances to come. The next time we see the surveyor and his son, they are dead, murdered at the hand of indigenous scouts.
Even so, the town of Horizon rises out of the desert, defiant of its native dissenters, a settlement of tents dominated by an enormous timber-floored dance hall. It is here, to the tune of a violin, that the menfolk, women and children commune, dance and drink to shed their inhibitions and enjoy a taste of the culture back home. But this is also the Wild West, and with Kevin Costner at the helm we can expect a good degree of brutality to come…
When the actor Kevin Costner approached Orion Pictures to direct his first film back in 1988, the company was far from convinced. Costner’s previous movie, Revenge, had bombed at the box-office and his new project was to be a Western, a genre that had become persona non grata since Heaven’s Gate lost so much money that it sunk a major studio (United Artists). Costner was also insistent that he would be the only star name attached to the project, that it would be three hours long (181 minutes), have subtitles and go by the perplexing title of Dances with Wolves. Of course, he was mad, but his Western – dubbed ‘Kevin’s Gate’ in the media – grossed $424.2 million and was nominated for twelve Oscars, winning statuettes for best picture and director, along with five others. It is unlikely that Costner’s new passion project will achieve an iota of that glory, but it is an exercise of staggering chutzpah.
A four-part, clumsily titled saga that is directed, produced and written by Costner from a story he wrote with Jon Baird and Mark Kasdan and starring Costner as a horse trader who doesn’t even appear for the first sixty minutes (I counted), it is proving to be a commercial disaster. In its opening weekend, it trailed behind Inside Out 2 and A Quiet Place: Day One and is struggling to retain cinema screens. Yet the cinema screen is exactly where it should be seen – as few directors today understand the sweep and majesty of the Western. There are many parts of Horizon I that border on the masterful, even if the whole does not entirely hold together.
It is hard to imagine that in 1859 – exactly 100 years before the release of Some Like it Hot, North by Northwest and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows – America was still such an untamed country. Where Costner’s West differs from other depictions of it is in the preponderance of children, most of them already toughened by their surroundings and ready to raise arms. Unfortunately, Costner’s desire to mirror the beauty of Utah in the human component does border on the laughable. Every character under the age of twenty, and under a good layer of dirt, is perfection itself, particularly the female of the species. When, in the last hour, we meet a young Chinese woman, she is just as stunning as her Caucasian and Apache counterparts. This doesn’t exactly lend the film an air of plausibility, even as the production design and costumes work overtime to recreate the authenticity of the period.
It is regrettable that Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter II has already been pulled from its August release slot, as Chapter I has laid the groundwork for something spectacular. I, for one, would jump at the chance to see how these various narratives pan out, and hope to see how the Apache adversaries come into their own. One senses Soldier Blue in Costner’s vision, the controversial 1970 Western that started with a horrific massacre at the hands of the Cheyenne, only to be outdone by a far worse bloodbath perpetrated by the US Army. Horizon I is by no means a great film, but it is a rare one, studded with memorable moments, boasting superlative production values and a raft of excellent performances (Michael Rooker is wonderful as an avuncular sergeant-major). We may not see another production as brave, ambitious and accomplished in this lifetime.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Giovanni Ribisi, Abbey Lee, Will Patton, Jena Malone, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Jeff Fahey, Isabelle Fuhrman, Ella Hunt, David O'Hara, Owen Crow Shoe, Tatanka Means, Tim Guinee, Scott Haze, Tom Payne, Alejandro Edda, James Russo, Jon Beavers, Jamie Campbell Bower, Michael Angarano, Georgia MacPhail, Etienne Kellici, Angus Macfadyen, Dale Dickey, Colin Cunningham, Elizabeth Dennehy, Lindsay Foster, Antonio D. Charity, Ave Solvei, Cici Lau, Phoebe Ho, Gregory Cruz, Douglas Smith, Raynor Scheine, Hayes Costner.
Dir Kevin Costner, Pro Kevin Costner, Howard Kaplan and Mark Gillard, Screenplay Jon Baird and Kevin Costner, from a story by Jon Baird, Kevin Costner and Mark Kasdan, Ph J. Michael Muro, Pro Des Derek R. Hill, Ed Miklos Wright, Music John Debney, Costumes Lisa Lovaas, Sound Henry Cohen, Dialect coaches Kohli Calhoun and Keri Safran.
Territory Pictures-Warner Bros.
181 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 28 June 2024. Cert. 15.
