HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA – CHAPTER I

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, New Line Cinema

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 28, 2024

Filmmaker Kevin Costner is clearly building to something with Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter I, and that's the problem here. It's all about building. As the title tells us, this is the first installment of a multi-part story, with a second entry scheduled to be released in a matter of several weeks and the potential for more chapters to follow that. That means we're watching an incomplete tale, which we know as soon as the title cards arrive, but what's surprising and frustrating about Costner and Jon Baird's screenplay is how little drama, characterization, and sense of some narrative whole there is in this first movie.

Everything and everyone here are serving one purpose: to promise that more will come later. That almost certainly has to be the case, too. It's not just because this installment anticlimactically ends with a lengthy, dialogue-free highlight reel of the follow-up, which looks to expand upon and resolve this entry's many, many dangling story threads.

It's also on account of just how much the screenwriters have introduced in this initial chapter. On its own, the movie may not go anywhere, despite the multiple places it goes geographically as the story pulls from a sort-of census of Western archetypes, but we can feel the ambition behind and beyond this isolated section of the yet-to-be-seen expanse of the narrative. It's tantalizing in a certain way, especially when Costner and company hit upon a scene, a sequence, or an idea that does stand on its own. The writer/director is asking us to trust him, and while this installment may not succeed, there's enough here to still hold out some hope that the next one will pay off in some way—or, ideally, several of them.

Given just how many characters and subplots exist in this first movie, the odds are probably in the filmmakers' favor. The story pulls from a vast swath of the American West in 1859 and slightly beyond, as political tensions east of the frontier threaten to divide the United States.

None of that matters to the hopeful settlers, the calvary, the miners, the railroad workers, the peoples of indigenous tribes, and the mysterious gunslinger who make up the main cast and background details of this narrative. They're too busy claiming land that isn't theirs, protecting land that has been theirs for generations, digging and working the land to find resources or expand societal reach, and, all the while, trying to survive.

Survival is our introduction to the tale, as a group of settlers, promised a rich patch of land by a particular river in the desert by way of a flyer of enigmatic origin, quickly discover that the Apache already have a longstanding claim there. The settlers are attacked by a raiding party. The temporary settlement is burnt to ruins, and many are killed, leaving one group of survivors to form a hunting party for the culprits—or, for some, any indigenous people whom they come across—and Frances (Sienna Miller) to stay at a calvary encampment with her young daughter (played by Georgia MacPhail).

From there, the scope of this story slowly unfolds. We meet the calvary, overseen by the pragmatic Col. Houghton (Danny Huston), and suddenly realize in the third act that Frances has fallen for an officer named Gephart (Sam Worthington). We meet the Apache, who are divided between defending the land and staying out of the way. We're eventually placed among the members of a wagon train, led by Van Weden (Luke Wilson), traveling the Santa Fe trail toward the same promised plot and having some internal strife along the route.

There's also Ellen (Jena Malone), who shoots the patriarch of a criminal gang, takes a baby, and has to evade the gang leader's vengeful sons (played by a quietly imposing Jon Beavers and Jamie Campbell Bower). That part introduces Costner's character, the stoic Hayes Ellison, about an hour in, as he does the decent thing of trying to protect the child and the sex worker (played by Abbey Lee) watching the boy.

Who is this man, and what does he want, other than to be the reluctant but dependable hero? Those questions could be asked of pretty much every other character in this sizeable but shallow pool of familiar types and scenarios, but Costner, who's far from a stranger to this genre in front of and behind the camera, has such a steady hand with the hallmarks and shortcuts of this kind of material. When Ellison is first seen on horseback galloping past a line of riders to be perfectly framed in close-up, questions of the man's background and motives basically become pointless. That shot summarizes exactly who this character is more than any bit of dialogue could.

On the other hand, though, the movie is three hours long and necessitates at least one sequel to complete its narrative, so the shortcuts simply aren't enough in this case. There's no denying that Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter I is a big and bold story—part of a, definitely, bigger and, hopefully, bolder one to come. However, this installment is inherently unfinished—and in more substantial ways than not possessing a conclusion.

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