Horizon: An American Saga - Part One (Kevin Costner, 2024)
Horizon: An American Saga - Part One is the ambitious but sprawling epic western from writer-director-producer Kevin Costner, who also stars in the movie.
If you feel like the man had a lot on his plate, you are probably right. The first quarter of a possible four part movie series feels uneven from the beginning.
There are some amazing sequences, like the one in which a family is trapped indoors while Apaches try to kill as many settlers as possible. But there are other times when the movie seems to drift endlessly. Sometimes the movie looks great and highly cinematic. At other times less so.
It’s an interesting project, but I’m not quite sure how many people will follow Costner into the cinema to watch all four parts.
It may do a lot better on streaming, where people can watch it as a very long season of television.
Costner invested, as has been widely reported, 38 million dollar of his own money into the first two parts of this American Saga, with other financiers putting up the rest. I applaud him for his bravery. At least he puts his money to finance his love for cinema.
Apparently, the project started way back in 1988 as a single movie, but then grew and grew in scope and scale.
It takes place in the American west around the time of the Civil War in and around a fictional location called Horizon. It’s about the search for freedom and prosperity, but it’s also and perhaps even more about the price you pay for achieving those things.
There is a lot of violence and death, both on the part of the settlers and the indigenous people.
There are a lot of different storylines, that at one point or another connect with each other, and part of the pleasure is discovering how things fit together.
Co-written with Jon Baird, Horizon seems a bit more traditional than Costners previous westerns, Dances With Wolves (1990) and Open Range (2003), but of course that perspective may very well change over the course of the next three movies.
Apart from Costner, who first appears around the 55 minutes mark and so far is not really the lead, it stars the likes of Sienna Miller (as a widowed mother), Sam Worthington (as an army lieutenant) and Abbey Lee (as a hooker without a heart of gold), who all get a lot of dialogue and scenery to chew on.
I wish I could recommend it more, but I have a feeling Costner will be fine regardless of what I think of his ambitious but sprawling Horizon.
Note: Horizon is in cinemas now, with Part Two released at some point later in the year.