HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - chapter 1

A would-be epic that fails to sell its ambition and is narratively held back by the promise of three sequels, Horizon: an American Saga asks: if you build your dream project, will anyone come?

Kevin Costner has long been a champion of the western, but after reviving the genre singlehandedly in the early nineties with Dances With Wolves he goes on somewhat of a fool’s errand with his latest project: a four-movie, twelve-hour epic – partly self-financed – that promises to encompass nearly every single detail and nuance of how the West was won.

The first chapter of Horizon: an American Saga sets the scene for half a dozen story strands, that run the gamut from a classic revenge tale to blossoming love between a widow and a unionist soldier, and a wagon trail traversing the desert. Yet by the time the end credits roll, some three hours later, the plot has hardly progressed and none of the characters are clearly defined yet.

I would even struggle to call Horizon – Chapter 1 a movie at all: Costner merely assembles a few stories and anecdotes of frontier men and women into an incoherent, mostly unconnected preamble to a story that hopefully begins in earnest in the second part, to which the end of this movie already hints, quite jarringly, in a context-free ‘next on Horizon’ kind of way.

Which begs the question: wouldn’t this pet project have been better off as a limited TV series? One would assume so, as the current structure is ill-suited to the big screen, the visuals don’t pop cinematically either and there is a worrying dearth of exciting set-pieces. Even the cast seems to be acting for the small screen rather than the multiplex.

Horizon crashed and burned at the worldwide box office and wasn’t a hit with critics either, so it remains to be seen if Costner gets to fulfil his ambition with three follow-up films (the second premiered in Venice, while the third is apparently lensing). If he does, I hope he’ll get some joy out of it, because odds are – based on the amount of tedium in this first chapter – audiences won’t.

release: 2024

director: Kevin Costner

starring: Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Kevin Costner, Luke Wilson