Horizon: An American Saga - Part One
(M. 181 minutes)
3 stars
Kevin Costner's new film is wildly ambitious and magnificent in scope and execution, but with one fairly substantial flaw.
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With a mouthful of a title, Horizon: An American Saga - Part One is, as you might guess, just the start of something bigger.
As though he's working in a dusty and saddle-sore Marvel Universe set in the years just before the American Civil War, Costner is writing, producing, directing and starring in this four-part feature film series that will total a whopping 12 hours of screen time once the final film hits screens. Part Two will hit cinemas in August and the third and fourth parts are yet to be filmed.
![Jamie Campbell Bower, left, and Kevin Costner in Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1. Picture supplied Jamie Campbell Bower, left, and Kevin Costner in Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1. Picture supplied](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/MxhEgQKUJhZgHxwVaKiqcq/75ee3a65-4c47-4468-8bc6-e9961b021b01.jpg/r0_80_5160_2993_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
The substantial flaw I mention might, in time, turn out to be a strength, because as a screenwriter Costner is interested in developing long character arcs and using silence as much as dialogue in his storytelling. When you're looking back on this first film at the end of parts two or three or four, it might all make sense. But for now, three hours in at the end of Part One, Costner doesn't wrap anything up, leaving practically all of his characters mid-sentence, and leaving the audience with a giant case of comprehension interruptus.
Horizon is likely going to become a thriving town at some point in this film series but in Part One the promisingly-named piece of real estate, in what will be later named Arizona, is a hotly contested and troublesome piece of land.
As the film opens, the land is being surveyed by engineers whose work is being watched over from the hills by the local Indigenous people. We later see the first wave of pioneer settlers having their fledgling town of Horizon burned to the ground by, we assume, that tribe. A party from the local US military fort led by Lieutenant Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington) comes to the aid of what few survivors remain, including Frances (Sienna Miller) and her daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail), and takes them back to the relative safety of the community that has built up around the fort. It's a dangerous populace there, as frontiersman Hayes Ellison (Costner) discovers when he arrives in town and saves the life of Marigold (Abbey Lee), shooting her would-be killer and then taking her on the run.
Costner has assembled a huge cast and there are many disparate story threads that look like they're all going to converge in the town of Horizon, its name emblazoned on pamphlets held by starry-eyed and westward-bound folk throughout the film.
Costner's artisans create beautifully authentic sets (and then burn them down) and the costuming is top-notch too, with lovely pioneer workmanship that also has a musky lived-in look. The authenticity we're getting is also in the casting, people with wrinkled foreheads, without bleached teeth, though some of the lanky greasy-haired characters all looked interchangeably similar to me.
While Horizon has the Western genre ingredients that the young film-loving Costner grew up on, it continues a modern sensibility to racial politics he helped birth with Dances With Wolves.
The Indigenous cast, led by Owen Crowe Shoe, have as many storylines as those peopled with big Hollywood names, and rather than mark characters and their actions as "good" or "bad" like a John Wayne film, Costner is interested in cause and in complexity.