Director: Kevin Costner

Writers: Kevin Costner, Jon Baird & Mark Kasdan

Stars: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Owen Crow Shoe, Danny Huston & Abbey Lee

Running Time: 181 minutes

Please note there may be spoilers below.

Along with Francis Ford Coppola’s personally funded $100 million epic Megalopolis, and now with Kevin Costner’s $50 million dollar investment in his to-be-completed Horizon film series, it seems 2024 is becoming the year of the legacy star passion project. I wanted to avoid the dreaded term ‘vanity project,’ but unfortunately for this first chapter of a proposed 4-part release, the negative connotations of a vanity project do indeed apply.

When I see the title card of ‘Chapter 1’ or ‘Part 1’ or ‘Volume 1,’ a movie is immediately on shaky ground. It makes me feel like a television producer contemplating whether or not I should commission a pilot. Releasing a Chapter 1 is an act of blind faith and grand expectation, as if the audience for a further 3 chapters is already buying tickets for them, as if we’ve already committed wholesale to the idea of a series without the need for it to be actually good. Even by these standards, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is feeling particularly demanding of its audience.

You can’t help but admire the commitment of Costner. Whilst some may call his vision old-fashioned, he is entirely dedicated to a type of classical excess that always strays into literary dimensions. You could be fooled into thinking Horizon was based on a Margaret Mitchell novel. With multiple story treads, locations, real-historical context, and a cast of stacked Hollywood veterans and newcomers, at it’s best Horizon treads into How The West Was Won territory, a sweeping ensemble epic that could squeeze an embarrassed tear from John Ford’s wrinkly eye. Yet over the course of 3 hours, it remains a deeply unfinished and inconclusive experience, every single story thread left hanging in mid-air with the expectation that you’ve already bought your ticket to Chapter 2 in August. Some endings can feel like movie trailers, but I’ve rarely seen a movie that ends with an actual movie trailer.

Still, the first 2 acts are promising. The film follows the tribulations of a frontier town, Horizon, from its establishment by a missionary to the following years of its demise by an Apache raid. The story shares time to Frances Kittredge, played by an impressive Sienna Miller, a mother taking great pains to save the life of her young daughter. There’s Sam Worthington, who plays a First Lieutenant of the Cavary assigned to help the townsfolk. His Sergeant Major is an appropriately gruff Michael Rooker, whose accent meanders all the way from Donegal, Ireland to Deep South USA. Then there’s Costner himself, appearing half way through as a moral compass amongst the lawless, Hayes Ellison. He’s one of those heroes who spends his screen-time talking about how he wants no trouble, only for him to find a large stack of trouble around the next corner.

There are some standout scenes, some individual moments where Costner offers a convincing epic. In a film of languid pacing such as this, a Tarantino-esque dialogue scene preempting a burst of violence is much welcomed. It’s a flourish of color in an otherwise dull canvas. By the time you’re reaching the last hour, yet another new story thread is introduced. We cut to the Sante Fe Trail, where a slightly miscast Luke Wilson polices a wagon train on it’s way to the aforementioned Horizon. It’s the weakest story thread of the movie, and to introduce it after 2 hours is a death-sentence.

For all the negativity, I really do admire the defiance of this film. It hugely rejects the trends of modern media. There’s is absolutely nothing here that will trend on Tik-Tok by design, and I respect that. It’s a product of John Ford and early 20th Century literature, of a completely different time and mind-set. It’s a multi-layed, patient, morally grey depiction of slow New World life that’s keen on showing you everything from the political in-fighting of Apaches to Danny Houston monologuing on the crisis of immigration. Costner insists the film is apolitical.

Costner is stretching high for something eternal here, reaching to create a long, Michael Cimino scale experience of overlapping story-lines and breathtaking vistas. Since he sees The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) as his ideal movie, he must be aware of the risk he’s taking by refusing to offer a complete experience. This is an unfinished 3-hour movie, and the demands he’s putting on his audience, to not only accept it but embrace it, cannot be lost on him. It’s an enormous ask for 2024’s audience, and one I expect he’s not naive to.

But it’s his carnal sin that after the first end credit appears, we are left only with potential. Inside individual scenes, individual performances, isolated panoramas. There are many moments of graceful Hollywood classicism to enjoy, but the water is horribly muddied by the jaw-dropping insistence that you will not see a single completed story-arc. As opposed to the maximal, padded plots of long form TV, the delight of cinema is it’s willingness to offer sealed experiences that need no further insight than the price of a single ticket. It would be ill-advised to continue trying to mix the two.