In the first half of his epic passion project, Kevin Costner charts a cost across the vast expanse of the American west.
We have to keep going,” intones Kevin Costner’s Hayes Ellison toward the end of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, as he rides on horseback through a vast, mountainous sweep of frontier-land, on the run and destined for parts unknown. The worn fortitude in Costner’s voice is right for his character, a taciturn gunslinger in the vein of John Wayne, and reflective of the bootstrap mentality with which he’s shepherded this widescreen saga to the screen.
Costner directs, co-writes, produces, and stars in what he’s envisioned for over 30 years as an epic of Western expansion, told in four film chapters. To realise the project without compromise, Costner self-financed the $100 million production. Set in the 1860s, the film opens in Arizona’s San Pedro River valley, as surveyors measure out a parcel of land and Apache tribespeople look on from higher ground. The land, soon christened Horizon, is advertised far and wide as an answer to the prayers of those traveling west, though the brutal fate of the surveyors paints a different picture. In this opening, Costner distills to a few potent images of the conflict between white settler colonialism and indigenous civilizations fighting against their own erasure; that conflict is at the core of Costner’s film.
From Arizona, Horizon hop-scotches across territories such as Montana, where a woman (Jena Malone) flees her abusive husband; Wyoming, where she ends up entrusting her baby to a local prostitute (Abbey Lee); and Kansas, where a wagon-train leader (Luke Wilson) struggles to guide a cavalcade of frontier folk through the Sante Fe trail. Back at Horizon, the settlers are decimated in an Apache raid – the film’s searing centrepiece.
But the risky gambit of Horizon’s screenplay, by Costner and co-writer Jon Baird, is to collapse a television season’s worth of storylines and characters into a feature-film frame, and such intense sequences are thus outnumbered by lengthy bouts of table-setting melodrama. Picking up the steam needed to power such an old-school locomotive of a narrative, and laying the tracks down on which it can travel, consumes this first instalment; presumably, Chapter 2 will pick up the pace while illuminating more of Costner’s perspective on the material.
Filmed in southern Utah by Dances with Wolves DoP J. Michael Muro, Horizon maximises the majesty of sun-scorched plains and rolling mountain ranges. Still, nothing on screen is mythologized as compellingly as Costner’s own blood, sweat, and tears – the sense of manifest destiny implicit in his efforts to explore how the West was won on such a sprawling canvas. It’s too early to declare Horizon a success, a disaster, or even a noble failure, though this first instalment makes it clear audiences traveling west with Costner should prepare for a lengthy trek.
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Published 27 Jun 2024
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