It ’s tempting to celebrateHorizon : An American Sagaon grounds of gumption alone . Having successfully come to his calling withYellowstone , Kevin Costner has taken leave of that television sensation , ride off into the sunset in avocation of a grander ambition : to write , direct , and star in an old - fashioned Western opus , a frontier taradiddle spanning age , long stretches of country , and multiple installments . Is there a serious use of life history working capital than the realization of a passion project ? After decades of carrying the Aaron’s rod for this unstylish genre , Costner has earned the indulgence of a supersized tribute to its value .
But somewhere in the middle ofHorizon ’s interminable first chapter ( its second arrives in August , with two more in some stagecoach of development ) , an sarcasm begins to conciliate over this three - hour maze of cavalry - opera house archetypes and broadly connect subplots . The other oaters Costner has manoeuver — his Oscar - winningDances with Wolvesand the laterOpen Range — were wholesale , stately dramas that recalled , with a minimum of throwback bickering , an older era of Hollywood heroic . Horizoncertainly progress to for the vintage spirit of the Western ( it ’s modern only in its marginally enlightened political relation ) , but the plotting suggests nothing so much as a bloated miniseries stretching outwards in multiple counselling . It ’s as if Costner has abandoned his humble - screen success for a prideful return to the heavy screen , only to make a motion picture that ’s basically television .
The playscript , which he wrote with Jon Baird ( this is where the problems begin ) , gracelessly juggles no few than four freestanding narratives , disseminate across the West of 1859 , properly on the cusp of the Civil War . Over 181 very long minutes , Costner will leap from Arizona to Montana to Wyoming to Kansas , get across numerous persona , some of them not even appearing until well into the second hour . ( There are more introductions to fall , too , judging from the actors attached toHorizonwho do n’t show up inChapter 1 . )
The titular nerve center of the floor , the point on the function where Costner ’s various winding game trail will presumably meet by and by this summertime , is the eponymous riverbank settlement . Horizon ’s position on land not yet steal from the Indigenous has made it a target of the Apache , who set in motion a nighttime raid on the community in the cinema ’s first bragging set piece , leaving only two hidden survivors : a mother ( Sienna Miller ) and her apple - cheek daughter ( Georgia MacPhail ) . The sequence is think of to be a nightmare — a fervent colonial reckoning in all in of night — but Costner is gun shy about the carnage . There ’s a fine line between Hellenic and stodgy , andHorizoncrosses it often .
Marauding Native Americans were , of course , a fixture of the classic Westerns the film is in part evoke . Costner , whoseDances with Wolvesreflected an excusatory shift in how tribes were long portrayed by Hollywood , is n’t seem to revive the blatant racism of those older cinema . The architect of the massacre , an Apache warrior diagnose Pionsenay ( Owen Crow Shoe ) , sees force as the only viable deterrent to white trespasser finally forcing them off the land . If he ’s a villain ofHorizon , he ’s much more sympathetic than the others . But the interestingness in his motivation feel a fleck perfunctory , even obligatory , at least in this inaugural accounting entry . Costner plainly ca n’t wait to get through his scenes and on to others .
The hatchway hour is rocky going , thanks largely to those former present moment in Horizon , where mostly unknown actors evince a certain community - theater stiffness in their Old West costume . As in many Clint Eastwood productions , the less - seasoned performers look a little run aground . Horizonaccordingly picks up as its whiz power increases . Sam Worthington , as a gentlemanly soldier drifting hesitatingly into a Latinian language with Miller ’s widow , deliver one of the loosest , most charming performance of his career . Has his prison term in Pandora livened him up , or does he just look like Laurence Olivier compared to some of those around him ? Costner father a muckle out of Luke Wilson , too , whom he casts as the reluctant leader of a waggon train that hauls a raw premium of histrion into the overstuffed picture .
Horizonnever quite becomes a vanity project . Costner , after all , does n’t show up for about an hour . He does hand himself a dramatic entrance : riding directly up to the camera with a sheik of medicine . His character , a horse trader hiding a surreptitious ( if unsurprising ) talent for gunslinging , is a classic Costner hero , rugged but peculiarly civilised . He ends up slip up into the role of makeshift bodyguard for a golden - tressed prostitute ( Abbey Lee ) and a small child , butHorizondoesn’t perquisite that strand of the tale over any of the others . Nonetheless , the movie only benefit from Costner ’s wizard world power , his relaxed gravitas .
As a film producer , he seems charge between indulging the mythological romanticism of the Wild West and interrogating its moral ambiguity . Horizon ’s bleakest storyline involve a young male child whose avidness to join the cavalry curdles as he witnesses his own search party — assemble to find the perpetrators of the butchery in Horizon — tear through a random tribe , indiscriminately collecting scalps that can be deal . Vengeance , the picture say , becomes just another wheel of capitalism . Elsewhere , the handwriting gets more heavy - handed in its handwringing : One can - earned conversation finds the graphic symbol pontificating on the inevitability of Manifest Destiny like prison term - trip story professor . Then again , no scene of implausible speechifying can beallbad when it ’s Danny Huston and Michael Rooker delivering the speech .
For all the gray country Costner grazes , he ca n’t assist but fraction his massive cast of characters into stock roles : cowboy with good manners and dependable marksmanship ; damosel thrash their eye at them ; sapless , milquetoast mod men unable or unwilling to fight back their wives ; sadistic scoundrels . Costner take limited delight in disposing of the latter . There ’s a long , intensify scene where his Hayes Ellison deflects the insults of a scrawny , antagonizing murderer , the two wandering up a hillside that ’s really a wild leek to forgo dueling pistols . It ’s a dull play to violence , Tarantino - esque in pace but not dash .
Pace , as it turn out , is what downsHorizon . The moving-picture show saunter and meanders , going nowhere slow . By the end of its mammoth runtime , the plot has barely inched forward . It ’s all apparatus , an eternal parade of introduction and inciting incident , like the grist of an overlong pilot for a show you would n’t complete . And then the film just stops dead in its running , trim back jarringly to a glorified “ next time on ” trailer publicise the gunfight to occur . Perhaps it ’s unjust to judgeChapter 1on its own price . It ’s simply one part of a larger story , and all these strands of action will presumably hail together inChapter 2 . Then again , who have it off ? With Costner hard at work on more , anything like an ending — or even a story proper — could still be a mere touch on the distant horizon .
