Everyone’s talking about one of the boldest cinematic gambles in years, but few have bothered to see what Kevin Costner invested in. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, released last weekend to underwhelming returns, earning a lowly $11 million from over 3,000 theaters. On the surface, this result doesn’t seem disastrous, but this lone film doesn’t tell the whole story. Chapter 2 will hit theaters this August, and two additional chapters are in the works. Chapter 1 was budgeted at $100 million, with the budget primarily funded by Costner.
Based on the tepid response to the first installment of this ambitious Western epic, Costner garnering mass audience interest in Chapter 2 will be an uphill battle. Every appreciator of film as an art form pulled for Costner and his audacious swing, but there is a reason why audiences expressed little interest in this bloated, meandering, and unfocused throwback to a stagnant genre. Costner, who revitalized his career by starring in the hit Paramount series Yellowstone, forgot he was making a movie, which is evident in the shaggy pacing of Horizon.
Kevin Costner Brought a TV Mindset to ‘Horizon’
Costner, one of the brightest stars of the last 30 years, took his talents to the small screen in 2018 with the premiere of Yellowstone, a soap Western evoking a flavor of pastiche Americana rarely depicted in modern media. It’s a show for an older demographic — the kind that the streaming boom often disregards. Everything looked peachy for Costner in the late stage of his career as a television star, but then suddenly, Costner walked away from the Taylor Sheridan show. He had his eyes on something grander, more ambitious, and seemingly unattainable: a 4-part self-financed Western epic exclusively for the big screen. Costner facing doubt over the prospect of an epic historical Western is nothing new, as his directorial debut, Dances With Wolves, was a smash hit and dominated the Academy Awards. Over 30 years later, he would return to write and direct another sweeping Western saga, chronicling American settlement in the West before and after the Civil War across four storylines.
Unless the film legs it out in the following weeks, Horizon doesn’t appear to have the makings of a triumphant showcase from Costner. Having an extended stay at the box office requires positive word-of-mouth, something Horizon lacks. Early reviews of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival were less than ideal. The positive and negative reviews had one consensus: the film is most certainly an incomplete story — to be continued with subsequent installments. While this is an obvious point considering the film has “Chapter 1” in its title, hearing this news is usually discouraging. Furthermore, the most damning criticism thrown at Horizon was that it had the pacing and narrative arc of a television series. Comparing Horizon to TV programming might seem like an implicit bias due to Costner’s recent stint on a Western series, but the criticism makes sense upon viewing.
Meandering pacing, juggling multiple storylines and character arcs, and cliffhangers bode well for television. The medium encourages a more passive viewing experience, allowing viewers to mentally check in and out of specific plots that spike their interest. Television is heavily serialized, which trains viewers to not expect resolution and a tight three-act structure with each episode. Film, on the other hand, aims for the opposite. When a film (a 3-hour one nonetheless) carries the urgency (or lack thereof) of TV, it creates a sluggish viewing experience. While not an abject failure, Horizon ultimately fails to live up to Costner’s ambitious cinematic frontier. The root of its problems lies in the inextricable traits that the film shares with television, particularly the lack of narrative centrality.
Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon’ Doesn’t Have a Main Point
The storylines in Horizon: Chapter 1 consist of Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter taking shelter at a Union Army camp led by Lieutenant Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) after the Horizon settlement is destroyed during an Apache raid, horse trader Hayes Ellison (Costner) and local Wyoming sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee) evading pursuit from outlaws seeking revenge on Marigold, a wagon trail led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) traveling to Horizon for settlement, a group of bounty hunters hunting down Apache tribes, and the tribe of Indigenous people conflicted over the appropriate way to handle the threat of white settlers on their land. This description barely cracks the surface. Costner shows no hesitancy to bombard viewers with all these characters and motivations. While the presentation of this sweeping tale is not messy, as each story is told without intercutting between other segments, it is information overload. The lack of connective tissue in the first installment undermines the “epic” quality of the film. Each segment on its own could potentially serve as a compelling individual film, but when multiple intricate storylines are thrown together, the direction loses cohesiveness.
Horizon’s hollow center would be forgivable if it had a stronger immediate hook for the audience. There are stand-out scenes that demonstrate Costner’s chops for directing Western set pieces, such as the Horizon night raid and the stand-off between Hayes and Caleb Sykes (Jamie Campbell Bower). However, the fervor of these classical Western sequences is drowned out by the weight of the overarching plot. Engaging character moments, notably Frances’ flirtations with Lieutenant Gephardt and the artistic aspirations of a newlywed couple on the wagon trail, are refreshing, but they never push the narrative forward with any momentum.
Horizon’s fatal flaw is the decision to map out the entire framework of the saga without letting the viewer marinate with one character or setting. A 4-part epic Western saga is a daunting commitment for casual audiences, and Chapter 1 needed more urgency in its storytelling to make the viewer eager, rather than apprehensive, about sticking it out for three additional movies, presumably each roughly 3 hours in length. Presumably, he’ll have a more prominent presence down the line, but Chapter 1 was hurt by Costner’s limited screen time. To guide the viewers across this daunting saga, a reliable and trustworthy movie star can make the experience far more accessible. Not to mention, Costner’s Hayes Ellison is mysterious — a lone rider with inscrutable motivations and an anonymous personality.
Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon’ Gets Lost in Problematic Western Tropes
For as groundbreaking as Costner’s business strategy and artistic boldness is, the text of Horizon: Chapter 1 is surprisingly familiar, and, in some cases, retrograde. Costner cribs from three masters of the Western genre: John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Clint Eastwood. This demonstrates Costner’s deep-seated passion for the Western, although he doesn’t appear to be interested in progressing the genre’s complicated history of Native American depiction. Costner’s heart is in the right place, but Horizon can’t help but fall for insensitive tropes regarding the treatment of Indigenous people as savages. There’s an effort to humanize the group by giving them a dedicated story arc and extended dialogue scenes between the Native people, but they are served to further push the thematic elements of the film rather than being fleshed out.
However, the fracture among the tribe, amounting to Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), forming his own tribe separate from the Chief, is a compelling dramatic arc that presents the tribe’s politics humanely and authentically. Because the story is introduced through the lens of white settlers, the audience is trained to interpret the Indigenous people as outsiders. For Costner, he found his portrayal of Native Americans unapologetically authentic, saying to Entertainment Weekly, “I’m just so tired of everybody trying to be so delicate about things.” He expressed his disinterest in “spoon-feeding” the audience about the morality of Western expansion.
The closing moments of Horizon: Chapter 1 act as a teaser trailer for the upcoming Chapter 2 in August. Even after sitting through 3 hours and 1 minute of awkwardly paced and exhausting world-building, this teaser makes you excited about the next chapter, as it shows that the characters and stories will converge at the titular settlement. Despite the anticipation of the next chapter, one can’t help but feel cheated that they merely sat through table-setting. Kevin Costner’s saga was thought to be the product of a maverick visionary, but the lack of closure and singularity in Chapter 1 evoked the frustration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s insistence on saving the best for the next installment. An episodic structure between a film series is not innately fraught. With Dune, for example, each film is in conversation with each other while possessing singularity in their narratives. Perhaps Horizon will follow the same trajectory as a TV show your friend recommends to you with the warning that it “gets good after the first few episodes.” Costner has had the odds staked against his favor before, but this time, the odds might just be insurmountable.