Horizon, An American Saga – Chapter 1 (2024)

Review: written July 2024

Costner enjoys wagon the tail in sprawling but scattered western odyssey

I love a good Western, and I admire much of Kevin Costner's work – so a Western of epic scope directed and starring him, was something I was always going to get excited about. And the individual elements of it met my expectations – even if the movie as a whole fell short.

The movie centres around the dream of a town called Horizon, symbolic one assumes of the whole notion of the dream of America in the latter part of the 19th Century. We see fliers being handed around by a cross section of American pioneers – wagon trail immigrants, men escaping their past, cavalry officers torn between protecting settlers and keeping peace with the native American tribes, and young families wide eyed with the dream of the West. At the start, this dream is just a stake in the ground next to a river, being hammered in by a man with his son, to the bemusement of the Indians watching discreetly nearby. Yet this stake happens to be made at a key river crossing for the Apache nation, so when more white men come to turn the stake into something more, then conflict seems inevitable.

The bulk of the movie centres around this growing tension between ‘the aboriginals’ as one of the Cavalry describes them, and the tide of humanity starting to flow from East to West, both despite and sometimes because of the Civil war raging in the East. As Sam Worthington playing the Cavalry officer falling in love with a beautiful widow (Sienna Miller) points out, soon the Civil war will end, and the trickle will swell to a flood. It’s hard to watch without sensing an underlying political comment on the very contemporary debate around immigration.

There are some terrific performances from a top notch cast, the child actors in particular really hitting the mark. Kevin Costner (once he finally arrives a good hour into the movie) is perfect casting. And there’s a plethora of individually great scenes – mano a mano shootouts, Indian attacks, a tense escape by mother and daughter in a collapsing tunnel, a young boy moving just in time to avoid an arrow, and some believable one on one relationships. However, these are also padded out by some characters waxing lyrical far more than feels reasonable, always pointing out the history to us in case we couldn’t absorb it from the images. In one moment a young girl melts our hearts by cutting out some flowers from her quilt to give to young soldiers going to war, then the next moment this is undercut by someone pointing out how meaningful that was to them. Perhaps a tighter edit would have done a bit more “show, don’t tell” movie making.

The idea of using a geographic place to symbolise a moment in history, the opening up of the West, has been done before – “Once upon a time in the West” on the big screen, and “Centennial” on the small, for example. Arguably what they did right, and where this movie came somewhat unstuck, was in sticking to the place – use it as a window to observe history and humanity passing through. This movie seeks to expand the scope by heading further afield to investigate backstories and origins of the characters which will presumably come together in later Chapters. This means we are left with a movie full of compelling scenes and vignettes, and a strong sense of the place and both the hardships, excitement and romance associated with it, but these stories are scattered and take too long to come together into focus. Indeed, many of them don’t even do so in this instalment, despite its 3 hour running time.

Splicing together these different stories might make sense as we head into the next chapter, but I was a good half way through this movie before I really began to get my head round who was who and where, and even when... And after all that, the ending – well, it wasn’t one. The end just segues into a trailer for Part 2, before you realise what was happening. So yes, it’s epic, yes it has excitement, romance and scope played by a great cast, photographed well… but despite all that you’re bound to feel a bit deflated by the time the end arrives. It lacks the resolution needed to define a great movie experience.

I’m not giving up on Horizon, I enjoy the world now that I’ve expended the effort of getting to know it – and while I do believe this is the type of movie meant to be seen on the big screen, I can’t help but feel the pace and scope mean this will find a more natural home on streaming where it’s possible to press pause and get some feeling back in your legs now and again.