Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 –… | Little White Lies

Festivals

Hori­zon: An Amer­i­can Saga – Chap­ter 2 – first-look review

07 Sep 2024

Words by Luke Hicks

A man on horseback, wearing a hat and coat, leading a group of horses in a mountainous landscape with a body of water in the background.
A man on horseback, wearing a hat and coat, leading a group of horses in a mountainous landscape with a body of water in the background.
Kevin Cost­ner deft­ly keeps the wheels turn­ing on his hyper ambi­tious four-part west­ern saga, despite a luke­warm recep­tion and scrapped release.

Against all odds, Kevin Cost­ner has pre­miered anoth­er chap­ter of Hori­zon: An Amer­i­can Saga, his epic pas­sion project west­ern that spans 15 years (and almost as many plot­lines) of set­tling the Amer­i­can West. Ini­tial­ly slat­ed for an August the­atri­cal release, Chap­ter 2 was pulled from the­aters after the box office fail­ure of Chap­ter 1 in June, and while he still doesn’t have financ­ing to fin­ish Chap­ter 3 or start Chap­ter 4, Cost­ner – who stars in, directs, co-writes, and pro­duces the saga – keeps going.

In Chap­ter 2, we begin to see how every sto­ry­line will end up in the set­tle­ment of Hori­zon, where things are start­ing to look slight­ly less mis­er­able – dare I say live­able. It would take a nov­el to cov­er the plot, but most of the sto­ry­lines con­tin­ue clean­ly from the first film, albeit with dif­fer­ent focal characters.

Sien­na Miller and Geor­gia MacPhail lead the Hori­zon seg­ment while Sam Wor­thing­ton is out (not dead, just gone). Will Pat­ton and Isabelle Fuhrman, along with Ella Hunt and Dou­glas Smith, take over the wag­on car­a­van seg­ment in dual sto­ry­lines, with Luke Wil­son rel­e­gat­ed to the fringes. Gio­van­ni Ribisi comes in like a book­end, open­ing and clos­ing the film as its near-mytho­log­i­cal Mr. Pick­er­ing, the soon-to-be vil­lain that Cost­ner has explained will dom­i­nate” chap­ters three and four.

Chi­nese set­tlers have also entered the pic­ture – show­cas­ing the longevi­ty of the country’s diver­si­ty – bring­ing a sawmill, a peace­ful atti­tude, and some much-need­ed eco­nom­ic resource­ful­ness to Hori­zon. Mean­while, Hayes Elli­son (Cost­ner) – wear­ing two black belts with big sil­ver buck­les, high-waist­ed trousers, thin sus­penders, and a ten-gal­lon hat, six-shoot­er strapped to his side – stays sim­i­lar­ly rel­e­vant. He’s one of the few who hasn’t arrived in Hori­zon by the end, busy man­ning the sheriff’s depart­ment in a lit­tle ranch­ing set­tle­ment of rab­ble-rousers and fools.

Sim­i­lar­i­ties also abound between the two chap­ters: the three-hour run­time (plus ten min­utes this time!), the 30-minute delayed entry of Costner’s intro­duc­tion, his stone-cold badassery, the pletho­ra of TV actors fill­ing out the cast, and the episod­ic feel. As in the first, White Moun­tain Native Amer­i­cans loom over Hori­zon on the peaks of cliffs watch­ing their land fill up. One gets the sense that Cost­ner is build­ing a war chest of expec­ta­tion out of their pres­ence, a huge bat­tle or, per­haps, a depic­tion of the sys­tem­at­ic dis­place­ment and era­sure of west­ern Natives in tow in sub­se­quent chapters.

Cost­ner has no inter­est in shy­ing away from the atroc­i­ties of the time. Where Chap­ter 1 honed in on the few good-heart­ed boys that set­tled the Amer­i­can West, Chap­ter 2 shifts gears, focus­ing on the pri­mal, invid­i­ous and sur­vival­ist nature of fron­tier Amer­i­ca. Death, bru­tal­i­ty, and sex­u­al vio­lence run ram­pant – a major tenet of the law­less time and place.

Where the first end­ed with a rous­ing siz­zle reel that hyped up the sec­ond, the second’s siz­zle reel is near­ly unin­tel­li­gi­ble, a glar­ing dis­play of the real­i­ty that Cost­ner hasn’t found enough mon­ey or pub­lic inter­est to war­rant the fol­low­ing two chap­ters. He hopes to shoot them back-to-back next spring, but the momen­tum seems to be fad­ing. Chap­ter 2 could be the nudge audi­ences need to get into it, but for the time being it remains in release limbo.

For all its ambi­tion and like­abil­i­ty, Chap­ter 2 often plays like pres­tige TV (that wouldn’t win awards). The rush with which it’s been made spills from the seams in the form of shod­di­ly rehearsed dia­logue, inex­plic­a­ble plot holes to boot, a prime­time tele­vi­sion tone, and a pres­sure-cooked edit. But it’s thor­ough­ly enjoy­able TV at least, and if you ever get the chance to see it on the big screen, the land­scapes are mag­nif­i­cent, the scope more grand, and the mood much more cinematic.

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