The second part of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga will get its wide release this year, as the actor-director continues his attempt to emulate a Western epic starring John Wayne. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 received middling reviews and made a substantial loss at the box office, proving that it’s easier said than done aspiring to one of the boldest productions that legendary director John Ford was ever involved in. Costner has previously explained that Ford’s 1962 project How the West Was Won has an enormous influence on his Horizon saga.
How the West Was Won assembled one of the best ensemble acting casts in Hollywood history for a sprawling 164-minute epic, divided into five chapters, about the expansion of the United States into the west of North America. John Ford was only one of three directors tasked with directing this monumental movie, alongside Henry Hathaway and George Marshall, while the all-time great actors who feature onscreen are too many to mention. Similarly, Kevin Costner has divided his work Horizon: An American Saga into four separate movies, also called chapters, and has cast a plethora of A-listers in the project.
How The West Was Won Was A Huge Influence On Kevin Costner
The Movie Had A Major Impact On Costner When He Saw It As A Child
At the 2021 Western Heritage Awards, Kevin Costner eulogized How the West Was Won, beautifully articulating the full extent of the movie’s impact on him when he first watched it as a child. “It was like God spoke to me and the scales came off my eyes,” he explained. “I never left my seat, refusing to leave even at intermission.” (via The Oklahoman)
From that spellbound eight-year-old, Costner grew into one of the foremost filmmakers of the Western genre still working today. His biggest movie Dances with Wolves and TV series Yellowstone are considered to be among the genre’s modern greats.
When watching Costner’s Westerns, it’s hard not to agree with him that the elegant style and slow-burning grandeur of How the West Was Won have been fundamental to his filmmaking.
As he observed during his Western Heritage Awards speech, these works take their time to tell a story almost as expansive as their panoramic backdrops, just like the classic cinematic Westerns of Ford and Wayne used to do. Costner jokingly blamed How the West Was Won for the lengthy running times of his films, remarking, “If you think my own pictures run long, then you can blame it on that day,” in reference to the first time he saw the movie.
This joke alone indicates the weight of importance that the director gives to How the West Won for its formative impact on him as a filmmaker. When watching Costner’s Westerns, whether it’s his 1994 biographical movie about Wyatt Earp or his 2003 revisionist genre film Open Range, it’s hard not to agree with him that the elegant style and slow-burning grandeur of How the West Was Won have been fundamental to his filmmaking.
How The West Was Won Is An All-Time Great Western Civil War Epic
The Movie Spans Five Chapters Of American History With An Ensemble Cast Of Acting Greats
The 1962 Western that so inspired Costner gives itself no easy task for a movie lasting little more than two and a half hours. Across its five chapters, How the West Was Won has to weave its way through the journeys out to the North and the Midwest made by citizens of the early United States, before plunging into the heat of the Civil War, moving all the way to the Pacific via the first trans-American railroad, and finishes with an outlaw gunfight. The movie does it all with a single New York family at its heart, while juggling the egos of around two-dozen Hollywood acting greats.
As well as John Wayne, the biggest names featured in the film are probably James Stewart, Debbie Reynolds, Carroll Baker, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb. Leading Breakfast at Tiffany’s cast member George Peppard almost steals the show in the movie’s third chapter, during which the Duke makes his appearance as Civil War Unionist general William Tecumseh Sherman.
How the West Was Won is superbly shot with gloriously vibrant sets and costumes. At the same time, it never strays from its job of depicting a people’s history of the American frontier spirit, and no part of the movie overstays its welcome.
Horizon Is Clearly Aiming To Be Like How The West Was Won
Costner’s Series Borrows Elements From The Movie’s Structure, Theme And Plot
The premise for Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga is clearly based on How the West Was Won, given the structural and thematic similarities between the two movies, and Costner’s effusive account of the 1962 movie’s profound effect on him. Like the John Wayne Western epic, Costner’s saga is set in the mid-19th century, and its plot interweaves the American Civil War with the westward expansion of the United States.
Not only is Horizon divided into chapters just like How the West Was Won, but its first chapter borrows directly from the plot of the John Ford epic. In How the West Was Won, Richard Widmark’s character Mike King shows complete disregard for a treaty respecting Native American land rights in Arizona, with violent consequences. In Horizon – Chapter 1, Sam Worthington’s Trent Gephardt does more or less the same thing, in the same state, with the same result, sparking a war between settlers and local Apache tribes.
Can Kevin Costner’s Horizon Match How The West Was Won?
It’s Hard For Any Movie To Live Up To A Work Of Such Magnitude
It has to be said that Kevin Costner’s Horizon project hasn’t got off to the best start for a sweeping Western epic movie series looking to emulate one of the genre’s greatest-ever achievements. Critics were split virtually 50-50 in their reviews of Horizon – Chapter 1 and early reviews for the second Horizon movie are in the same ballpark.
The biggest problem that Costner’s work suffers from is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a continuous narrative thread, grounded in the personal stories of a handful of protagonists, running through the heart of its plot. The genius of How the West Was Won is that it manages to span five different epochs of 19th century American history, introducing an array of supporting characters, while essentially following the journey of one family from start to finish.
Costner’s approach to characterization in Horizon has been too scattergun so far, but it’s to be hoped that his work ties together some of the loose threads from Chapter 1 later in the series. Even if Horizon: An American Saga can’t match How the West Was Won, however, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the series will turn out badly. Costner is comparing his work to one of the great Westerns at the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age, which would ultimately be a match for most movies ever made in the genre’s history.