‘Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1’ REVIEW: Interesting and overflowing with ambition
‘Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1’ REVIEW: Interesting and overflowing with ambition
Kevin Costner in Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 | Photo by Territory/K5, taken from IMDB
Culture is passed down from generation to generation through traditions, through artifacts, even through stories and memories. In a way, films are a way of capturing culture as a memory before they’re duplicated for home viewing and passed down to future generations.
In a way, the “dad movie” — and sharing them with a family that has varying degrees of excitement — is a modern way of experiencing that cultural passage. While there’s a defined consensus of what a dad movie usually is, the eligibility plays out a bit differently here. A lot of dads here in the Philippines grew up on Fernando Poe, Jr. shoot-em-ups.
Anyway, where does Horizon: An American Saga stand in the ongoing legacy of defining the dad movie? I’d say it has its feet planted along that line, with a very modern desire to be a profitable, youth-capturing franchise. This makes it an intriguing mixed bag that will get anyone — dad or not — perplexed by its ambition or invested in a story that’s essentially cinematic table-setting.
Asking dads to spend three hours of their time on a film is a big ask, though the right film can keep their attention up. Kevin Costner would know. After all, his Dances With Wolves ran three hours and one minute and leapt all the way to profits and a Best Picture Oscar. Horizon is Costner’s first saddle in the directorial chair since Open Range from 2003. A lot has changed, including audience’s storytelling preferences, and the general perception towards stories centered on white people.
While Horizon moves along a linear path, it has plenty of characters that capture its heart. This makes Wikipedia, rather than Letterboxd, the first thing the family’s youthful cinephile might open as the end credits roll, just to make sense of who’s who. There are familiar faces here, if you’re familiar enough with them.
Sienna Miller in Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 | Photo by Territory/K5, taken from IMDB
Sienna Miller and Sam Worthington have the film’s most significant screen time, though their budding romance, as with the whole film, is all set-up. Michael Rooker’s here, and so is Michael Angarano, if you recognize him beneath his look. This is also one of Jamie Campbell Bower’s first major roles following his breakout turn on Stranger Things.
After making a huge impression on the equally gargantuan Killers of the Flower Moon, Tatanka Means has a role here that—I hope—lets him do more in future entries. With a large ensemble, Giovanni Ribisi, billed fourth, doesn’t figure into the story until… well, I’ll leave that as a surprise for you.
At least he got paid for this one. Luke Wilson is also here, as the leader of a wagon trail with a heavy burden. Costner’s the one who gets the obligatory Cinematic Moments — even a predictable love scene that also feels belabored — but he saves his big, proper gunslinging moment for the second chapter.
Costner took his time to develop Horizon, and the film also takes its time to introduce its characters. By the time it ends, a lot has happened and nothing has happened. There are at least four main narrative strands here, each with potential — and a lot more that may or may not hold weight in future chapters.
The film’s first hour allows the audience to settle into one of its main narratives: the establishment of the town of Horizon and the Apache’s efforts to keep them out. This includes a devastating raid on the town of Horizon that leaves many dead, played out as a tragic act of violence with a melancholy score.
The film nobly tries to counter this with the Apache’s story of grappling with assimilation or preservation, even having them speak in Apache. But looking at the first chapter as a whole, there seems to be little hope of seeing proper nuance as the Native Americans are depicted as being stomped by capitalism and colonization.
Kevin Costner and Abbey Lee in Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 | Photo by Territory/K5, taken from IMDB
Once the film explains this for an hour, we’re then transported to other places. In one such place, Hayes Ellison (Kevin Costner finally showing up) strikes up a chemistry with a local prostitute named Marigold. But this association ropes him into a knotty revenge plot between Margiold’s housemate, Lucy, and two brothers bent on avenging their father, who Lucy shot.
In another story, a wagon trail makes its way to Horizon. Led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), the trail includes members of the Kitteridge family and a British couple barely chipping into the trail’s work necessities. It’s this story — that comes almost when the film seems done — that has plenty of the elements that makes it following.
One of the Kitteridges married and had a family before settling into Horizon at the start of the film. However, the father and son fall victim while trying to protect their family during the film’s opening Apache raid. The widow, Frances, and daughter, Elizabeth, rebuild their lives at a nearby camp and strike up romances of their own.
There’s also a subplot of a boy from Horizon who falls into a group of Apache scalp-hunters. All of this builds up to a rousing tease of scenes from Chapter 2, which comes out in a few weeks. And that’s the film. This description could be a spoiler, but is it really if it’s all still heading somewhere? Who knows when any of the stories presented actually overlap, if they even do so in Chapter 2?
Before filming earnestly began for the Horizon saga, Costner led the Paramount+ series Yellowstone, one of writer Taylor Sheridan’s many westerns and the streamer’s biggest hit. Costner left that cushy gig to risk making this film series. Kevin ‘Waterworld’ Costner certainly isn’t new to risk-taking.
But looking at only what’s presented on Horizon, it hardly has the visual and aural scale to warrant being called a big-screen spectacle. Despite using its first hour to focus the audience’s sympathies on the conflict between the Horizon settlement and the Apaches, the film’s latter two-thirds still volley across all its stories.
That’s also why Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 doesn’t have a proper set piece to warrant being called an epic, at least visually. The opening raid is played for devastation, but there’s no setup to convey the emotional scale of what Horizon’s townsfolk truly lose because of it.
Later in the film, Costner’s Hayes gets into a tense exchange that escalates into a shootout, but there’s no sense of how far their violence will spread or its potential to destroy everything in its path. These moments make the film feel more like a prestige miniseries than an epic film.
Revisionist Westerns often have a critique of American history in its sleeve. Horizon has some thoughts on its mind, but it may take the next film to even get a glimpse of what those thoughts are. You can say, “Oh, the Black people here are fellow townsfolk. That’s nice,” or “Wait, are those the Asians that America historically mistreated upon their arrival?”
There’s the aforementioned attempt at expanding on the story of the Native Americans whose presence in their own land is jeopardized by the incoming settlers. But because Horizon spends its first chapter largely on table-setting one can’t say whether or not it actually succeeds or fails in its racial analysis.
If you don’t like what Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 is selling — a three-hour epic that may or may not be a nuanced, multicultural (but still White-heavy) look at America Then and the ways it reflects on America Today — then this isn’t for you. It likely won’t appeal to many, as a film that essentially serves as a gesture towards ambition, expecting its sequels to fulfill its promise, isn’t going to satisfy many moviegoers.
Maybe when it becomes available for home viewing, it will find its audience — those looking for something they can watch at their own pace. Perhaps they will invite others to share their confusion and curiosity over this Horizon before heading to the next chapters.
‘Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1’ opened in Philippine cinemas last June 28, 2024.
