Costner’s American saga is ‘Dune’ for fathers

There’s about an hour left in Kevin Costner’s Western film Horizon: An American Saga That’s when Kevin Costner shows up. He plays Hayes Ellison, a horse trader who arrives in a small town in the Wyoming Territory, gets a strange letter written home, and then gets embroiled in a fight with a man he’s never met, which results in his life going in an unexpected direction. Shortly after we meet Hayes, the film introduces us to another major character, Luke Wilson’s Matthew Van Weyden, the inexperienced leader of a wagon train on the Santa Fe Trail who is desperately trying to keep his roving community from disintegrating in the heat of West Kansas. By the time the three-hour film nears its end, we’re left hoping we’ll meet more major characters sooner rather than later. Horizon It’s a brilliant, elaborate and at times heartwarming blast of old-fashioned storytelling – but for now, that’s half a movie. Maybe even that one fourth Of a movie: Addressing the audience at its Cannes premiere, after receiving a standing ovation, a clearly emotional Costner yelled out, “There’s three more!” We know that part two has already been shot and will be released this fall. It seems likely that parts three and four will only be made if audiences come out for parts one and two.

Was Costner’s scream a sign of victory or of forgiveness? Probably both. Horizon It feels like the opening chapters of a grand novel patiently falling into place, carefully sketching out characters and offering glimpses of their lives. It’s rich with period detail and filled with majestic scenery that matches the expanse of its story. But that could also be a curse, at least as long as the film exists only as this one installment. The power of those big, sweeping, novel-like stories lies in the ways we see those characters change, in how fate brings them together and separates them. Something of this size needs a shape, and right now, Horizon It’s basically just a moving plot line. We meet characters, and nobody changes. Random parts come floating out of thin air. A few familiar faces pop up in one scene or another. We assume this will all pay off a movie (or two or three) from now, but for now, everything is just there. Also, it would be silly to pretend the rest of the movie doesn’t exist; it clearly exists, we just haven’t seen it yet. Horizon: An American Saga Is Dune: Part One For fathers (and, hi, I’m a dad), and that movie stopped almost as soon as it started.

Incompleteness can be a problem in other ways, too. The first half of the film features something quite shocking to watch in 2024: an extended massacre of a riverside settlement in the San Pedro Valley by a group of Apaches. Costner mercilessly stages the bloodshed, showing individual families slaughtered, and then focuses on one particular family: the Kittredges, particularly mother Frances (Sienna Miller) and her daughter, Lizzie (Georgia McPhail), who will become major characters in the rest of the film. There is some context for the massacre. When the U.S. cavalry arrives late, the first thing Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) asks the survivors is, “What are you doing here?” In other words, this is not an accepted or safe settlement. On the other side, in the hills, an Apache chief rebukes the war party leader, Pionceane (Owen Crow Shoe), for what he has done. “The men are gone. But where they have gone, thousands will come,” he tells the daring young warrior.

Costner, the man who dances with Wolves (which, no matter what you think now, introduced most of the world to the plight of American Indians), didn’t want to let this incident serve as the sole driving force of his film. Horizon Obviously it will show us the echoes of this event, and the answer will be what the settlers and soldiers will eventually do to the Native Americans. And this first part really begins to show us some of those terrible echoes – but it’s still quite risky for Costner to start with such a sequence, leaving the emotional arc of his story incomplete.

There’s already been endless discussion about the rampant proliferation of part-one entries in Hollywood (and there was even some backlash from the producers of last summer’s film). Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One Sometimes, it’s a case of filmmakers creating a franchise on the spot, trying to guarantee that audiences will come for a follow-up. Sometimes, it’s an attempt to save money, fitting multiple movies under one production budget. Me, I blame the pernicious influence of television, with its constant need to serialize everything. In most of these cases, though, the films don’t need “part one” or “chapter one” or “book one.” They either work on their own or they’re so slow-moving, so full of filler, that all the parts should probably be edited together into one compact feature

Horizon — or, at least, this section Horizon — is a little different. Its great pace never feels boring, so it doesn’t feel like it should have been shorter. But it doesn’t work on its own either. It sets us up for something that never comes. It sets up characters we don’t really know. It could definitely be a TV series, but it looks so great on the big screen that it really shouldn’t be a TV series. Should Costner have just started this as a six-hour movie? Maybe! I would watch that movie, but I haven’t seen that movie. And it feels impossible to evaluate this movie, because, in some strange way, it doesn’t feel like anything has really happened yet.