Kevin Costner’s latest western is certainly not lacking in ambition. As the first of a planned four-film saga directed, co-written, produced and starring Costner, it’s a story that spans pioneering days through to the Civil War and beyond. It harks back to a bygone era of westerns but adds a sharply contemporary lens. It is by every definition an event.
As the opening chapter to the titular saga, Costner and co-writer Jon Baird paint in broad brushstrokes. It opens in 1859 in the San Pedro Valley, two years before the start of the American Civil War, as the first European settlers stake their claim on the first iteration of the town of Horizon. Yet this is Western Apache land, and the latter begin the first of several attacks to defend their land from the invaders.
Four years later, the town has begun to flourish before it is once again attacked and razed to the ground by Apache warrior Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe). The US Army, including 1st Lt. Gephardt (Sam Worthington) and Sgt. Major Riordan (Michael Rooker), gather the survivors (including Sienna Miller). None of this dissuades the steady march of the westward wagons on the Sante Fe Trail, led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), who is barely holding together the would-be settlers.
Meanwhile in Wyoming, horse trader Hayes Ellison (Costner) becomes involved with prostitute Marigold (Abbey Lee). Yet in Marigold’s care is an infant that becomes of the target of the Sykes brothers (Jon Beavers and Jamie Campbell Bower), a pair of fierce gunmen acting on the orders of family matriarch Mrs. Sykes (Dale Dickey).
These narrative pieces all seem quite disparate, and for the duration of the picture they all remain mostly separated. On the surface, this might seem like a frustrating feature-length piece of exposition. Yet Costner’s intention is seemingly showing us the totality of the western experience. If you go into this film accepting that it’s only the first quarter of the story, you’ll be fine.
The most compelling of these threads is ultimately the one with Costner himself. Like Clint Eastwood before him, he’s given himself the juicy role of a reluctant protector who is clearly handy with a gun. As a result, Lee’s character of Marigold can often be more of a Mari-Sue. Dickey, Rooker and even Wilson don’t get as much screen time as one one would like, but one also imagines that their characters will be expanded in the later chapters. Kittredge (Miller) and her daughter look like they will come into their own, especially the former’s relationship with Worthington’s army man.
Which does make it awfully hard to put your thumb on the connective glue at this early stage, or even where the politics of this film lands. There are times to buy fully into the same manifest destiny as the people who have packed their entire belongings into a wagon train across country. That said, when one soldier opines words to this effect, Gephardt quips back “You want to explain that to the Indigenous?”
Which brings us neatly to the depiction of First Nations peoples. When they are introduced, it seems as though it is purely as a throwback to the golden age of westerns where ‘Indians’ were the aggressors to the ‘cowboys.’ Which would be an odd approach from the Academy Award-winning director of Dances with Wolves. However, we’ve only been looking at the story from one side of the river as it were. Later, we witness Pionsenay arguing with his tribal elder Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz) over his aggressive actions. The movement and families of the the Western Apache are shown in juxtaposition with westward wagons, indicating that this is another thread where we are only getting part of the tale at this point.
Re-teaming with his Open Range cinematographer J. Michael Muro, HORIZON is filled with glorious visuals. The mesas and mountains of southern Utah are ever present, looming like silent background characters. The reverential pacing allows us to soak in endless yellow canopies or frosted landscapes in equal measure.
As the montage for the second chapter plays out at the end of this three hour opener, it’s clear that we’ve only just scraped the surface of this world. Some have compared this with the pilot episodes of a mini-series — or more cruelly a ‘quarter of a story’ — but I prefer to think of it as a theatrical serial played out on the grandest scale possible. After all, Costner certainly isn’t alone: Dune, Fast X and Mission: Impossible some recent examples of films that are telling their story with large scale instalments.
Like the pamphlets scattered through the film for the growing town of Horizon, here Costner spends three hours planting the idea of a myth in our minds. It’s the very antithesis of modern event filmmaking, stubbornly refusing to lay out everything at once and gently asking us to return for more every six months or so. It’s going to be wonderful witnessing Costner manifest his own destiny regardless of how it all turns out.
2024 | USA | DIRECTOR: Kevin Costner | WRITERS: Jon Baird, Kevin Costner | CAST: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Jamie Campbell Bower, Jon Beavers, Owen Crow Shoe, Tatanka Means, Luke Wilson | DISTRIBUTOR: New Line Cinema, Madman Films (Australia) | RUNNING TIME: 181 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 28 June 2024 (USA), 4 July 2024 (Australia)
