Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 review: Kevin Costner stakes it all

The blessing and curse of Kevin Costner’s first chapter in his “American Saga,” Horizon, is that there’s no visible horizon (yet). It opens with a surveyor marking out the boundaries for a new home with his son, making it an apt metaphor for experiencing the three hours that follow. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is about laying the groundwork for an ongoing project. It is not complete within itself. You’re much more likely to enjoy Horizon if you know that in advance. That way, you can appreciate how Costner is staking out the themes and ideas to come.

Spanning the San Pedro, Montana, and Wyoming territories, with the Civil War brewing in the background, Chapter 1 introduces us to a handful of characters who have already been scattered to the wind by war, fortune, necessity, and occupation. The land is littered with the blood and bodies of the old and young. This is not a naïve Western that believes in an innate purity or submissiveness of the land. Costner understands that the West that Americans hear about in stories and see in classic Westerns like How The West Was Won are built on bloodshed. Horizon begins with the land being a hotly contested space since the arrival of white colonizers.

After an Apache raid on the first Horizon settlement, Francis Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her surviving daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) come under the care of the Union Army, including a delightful Michael Rooker as Sgt. Major Riordan, led by First Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington, king of unending franchises and wearing blue amongst the natives).

Up north, Lucy (Jena Malone) is shooting people in her ongoing feud with the Sykes family, which includes Jamie Campbell Bower as the hotheaded Caleb Sykes and Dale Dickey as the clan’s indomitable matriarch. Further in town, a wayward and wistful sex worker named Marigold (Abbey Lee) strikes up a romance with the mysterious “saddle-trader” Hayes Ellison (Kevin Costner). All the while, Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) is leading a barely diverse cavalcade of settlers, including Francis’ father-in-law Owen (Costner regular Will Patton) westward on the Santa Fe Trail towards Horizon…because a marketing pamphlet told them the town offers “premium virgin land” free from conflict, where they might live the new American dream. But will it be as good as they say?

”Civilization” is rarely civilized in Costner’s Westerns. So there’s no promise that Horizon will be harmonious, even if it does manage to survive the Apache ambushes. The other towns we pass through in Chapter 1 are populated with slightly uncouth characters with a vague slapstick sensibility. They’re where messy meet-cutes and duels happen, nothing like the sublime expanse of the landscape, filled with grand melodrama and romance.

And cinematographer J. Michael Muro’s landscape shots are pristine. Costner and his long-time collaborator imbue Horizon with an old-school Romantic appreciation of nature, marveling at its heightened beauty and humbled by its vast stillness. For all of Costner’s mixed musings on the Western genre that bubble up through the film, he remains certain of why the landscape became the background of myths. It is a space that has existed “since time immemorial,” one whose environment has been an actor in human history.

While the white people inspect the land and claim it as theirs, Native scouts watch them from a distance. Costner constantly plays with who is watching whom, often giving Native tribes the most outside objective perspective as stewards of the land. While this does provide some worthwhile justification for the raid on Horizon that we see early in the film, Costner can’t help but fall into some of the classic Western traps, volleying between depictions of Native characters as noble and savage, framed with generational debates within Native groups about assimilation versus rebellion. Gregory Cruz is the stoic grandfather Tuayeseh, watching as his descendants, like Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), are called to seemingly “irrational” violence as white people make piecemeal of their home.

The Native characters are rightfully concerned with the certainty of the wagon trains and the “white-eyes” that will keep coming. Unfortunately, I don’t know if Costner has enough in this picture to attract anything other than white eyes. Even with the Civil War looming in the future, there’s minimal Black perspective and even less Chinese representation despite their importance in the area. Though Costner is attempting to trouble the Western a little bit, it’s not a totalizing vision that upends the white-centered genre tentpoles that have long celebrated masculine individualism over collective engagement, championing “improvement” over nature and the right of white people to have a homogenous space.

Kevin Costner has circled many ideological, narrative, and thematic wagons, some in direct conflict with one another. Since we don’t know if the train is leading to any one place, Chapter 1 is a different kind of moviegoing experience and is difficult to assess on its own. There are three more planned chapters, so there’s no sense of completion or finality. Chapter 1 is a film that is almost entirely exposition and covers an untold number of years in the blink of an eye with very little handholding from Costner or co-writer Jon Baird. We are dropped into the separate yet detailed worlds of all those characters, worlds which never meet, and try to keep up with them as they spread out. This film feels like a TV pilot, but on a theatrical scale that prefers complete narrative arcs even within an ongoing series.

The key is to manage expectations. Some details may whiz by, but accepting that this saga is ongoing will stave off the boredom of waiting for something purposeful to happen. There’s enough violence to keep the dads awake—even when they’re on their feet, like the gentlemen one row down from me who stood up during the film for a solid ten minutes. There is solid filmmaking to enjoy. It’s just hard to know what it’s all for.

The remaining chapters will determine the legacy of Chapter 1. The film opens with a surveyor scoping out the land for Horizon, and closes with a survey of the building excitement to come, not unlike Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, which also ends with a montage from a much better film. Our true adventure awaits, and we’ll witness whether Horizon can manifest its projected destiny as a worthwhile American cinematic saga. Chapter 2 arrives in August.