Kevin Costner’s Neo-Western Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1 Is an Interminable Slog
I am a long-time admirer of Kevin Costner.
As an actor, he’s been a sturdy big-screen presence for four decades, and his small-screen turn as a gruff, tough family patriarch in Yellowstone is a big part of what has made that show so successful over the last five years. Costner’s work behind the camera, meanwhile, has never been short of interesting. Whatever its contemporary reputation, Dances With Wolves remains a powerfully made Hollywood epic. Costner’s much-maligned adaptation of The Postman is a mess, but it’s a fascinating curiosity, an ambitious and personal undertaking from a filmmaker determined to take big swings on the big screen.
So it is with great regret that I say that Costner’s latest film, Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1, is very nearly unwatchable. I say “very nearly” because I did, in fact, watch it. Somehow. Barely. And I am here to warn you away.
You should not subject yourself to this movie. Not even if you love westerns. Not even if you adore Costner. Not even if Dances With Wolves is your all-time favorite movie. Not even if you have binge-watched all five seasons of Yellowstone a half-dozen times. Costner’s plodding three-hour prologue is interminable, unsalvageable, and flat-out impossible to care about. Rarely has the word “slog” been such an apt description of a movie. And that “Chapter 1” has been appended to the title because if Costner has way, there will be three more of them.
That’s right: Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1, is the first of an intended four-part series, each presumably as long and interminable as this one. The second part has already been shot and is scheduled for release later this summer. I cannot imagine wanting to sit through it, let alone two more in some future year.
The best you can say about Horizon‘s first chapter is that, like Costner’s better work, it is ambitious and personal, a big-screen big swing that Costner has been trying to make for years, and that he financed largely out of his own pocket. Set in the mid-1800s as Americans were moving west, the movie sprawls over much of A
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