Horizon: An American Saga Series - Review Thread

Back in 2015, while promoting his film The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino told the website ShotList “I like westerns, and I like the idea that, when I’m done with everything, I’ll be considered a western director… And I think you need to do three westerns to consider yourself a western director.” Later he reiterated this and said he doesn’t count “cheat” movies like Kill Bill Vol. 2 or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to count towards this, so if he sticks to his ten movie limit and his next movie isn’t a Western then he’s not going to achieve this goal. Truth be told given the genre’s wane there are probably not many other major contemporary auteurs who are going to be able to hit this goal either. There’s Clint Eastwood obviously (though he’s mostly just “contemporary” because of a long lifespan), and the Coen Brothers have made it there if you’re willing to count No Country for Old Men, and I’m sure there’s a name or two I’m not thinking of, but the modern figure who really seems to embody the label of “western director” is none other than actor/director Kevin Costner. Costner’s debut film is one of the most successful westerns of the last 50 years, the Academy Award winning Dances With Wolves, and thirteen years later he also directed the under-appreciated cowboy movie Open Range putting him definitively as the director of two bona fide westerns. From there one could make an argument that his creative influence over the Lawrence Kasdan directed Wyatt Earp could be counted, or that the frontier elements in his post-Apocalyptic films Waterworld and The Postman counts them as westerns or that his acting in things like Silverado, “Hatfields & McCoys,” and “Ýellowstone” makes him definitively linked to the genre regardless of how many he’s directed. But such cheating is no longer needed because he’s opted to enter the “western director” club in the most dramatic way possible with his latest epic of the west, the “Horizon” series.

The “Horizon” series is a wildly ambitious project helmed and partly financed by Kevin Costner which is intended to play out an epic western story over the course of four lengthy movies that are to be released over the course of 2024 and 2025. After a prologue of sorts our story begins in 1863 in the San Pedro Valley with a burgeoning frontier town being attacked by a band of Apache who burn the place down and kill vast swaths of the population, and then we start to follow some of the surviving parties from that. Firstly we follow the Apache attackers, who are revealed to have been conducted by a young hothead named Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) who is at odds with tribal elder Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz), who worries this will lead to further violence and reprisals. This proves correct as a cadre of survivors led by a vengeful old man named Tracker (Jeff Fahey) and including an angry adolescent boy named Russell (Etienne Kellici) head off looking for Apache scalps. Meanwhile other survivors including a woman named Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) follow the less vengeful survivors follow Cavalry Lieutenant Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) to a military base in the vicinity. Meanwhile, we’re also introduced to two other storylines occurring elsewhere which will presumably converge on Horizon in later installments. We’re introduced to a wagon train heading in from the East led by a guy named Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) and finally we’re also introduced to a conflict in the Wyoming territory where we’re introduced to a local sex worker named Marigold (Abbey Lee) who finds herself mired in a conflict between her friend Lucy (Jena Malone) and her estranged family which culminates in a local drifter named Hayes Ellison (Kevin Costner) having to step in.

As you can probably tell there are kind of a lot of storylines going on at once here and the movie somewhat awkwardly shifts between them. These storylines do not get equal screentime (we’re only barely introduced to that wagon train for example and the storyline has gone nowhere by the end of this chapter), and often right once one of them seems to get going it will cut away from it. At least at this stage it feels less like a movie where multiple stories intersect and weave together and more like a TV show like “Game of Thrones” introducing separate B and C stories that might theoretically come up eventually but which feel like entirely separate movies being broken apart here. “It feels like it should be a TV show” is probably going to be something you hear a lot about “Horizon,” and while I value the theatrical experience and want experiments like this I’m not unsympathetic. We’ve had multi-part theatrical films like this before (Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace comes to mind) but this pacing and structure feels a lot closer to something you’d see on television, in part because there’s just something kind of weird about finishing a lengthy day at the movies only to have things end not with a resolution, or even with a cliffhanger, but just with a “tune back in next week for more.” Had they maintained their feature length structure they might have benefited from a streaming release akin to something like what Netflix did with the “Fear Street” trilogy a couple years ago where you get a movie a month and don’t need to make too much of an investment.

So structure aside, what is Costner doing with this series? Well, Horizon is a fictional town and all of the characters here are fictional, but I’m pretty sure the town is meant to be a stand-in for Tombstone, Arizona (also located in the San Pedro Valley, though with a much less appealing name) and the Tuayeseh character is probably meant to be a stand-in for Geronimo. So this isn’t trying to be some kind of Spaghetti Western romp or something, it’s very much a movie looking to make really big proclamations about the “the west” and about the drive for migration and settlement, specifically it seems to be tying western settlement with “the American Dream” and by extension “Manifest Destiny.” The one thing you’ll find in all of the storylines (except for the Apache one) is an advertising flyer that’s apparently been spread far and wide advertising Horizon as a potential boom town waiting to be settled which is apparently drawing all these people together and how this flyer ignores the many challenges and downsides of this settlement. The movie is not exactly subtle about this theme and they don’t just let this be communicated with the poster, in fact there’s a lengthy conversation between the Sam Worthington character and his commanding officer about this. I’d also point out that this isn’t exactly the most original of takes. It’s kind of been the subtext and/or text of most westerns we’ve seen since the dawn of the genre and whether we need twelve hours of material to re-iterate it remains to be seen.

I'm guessing we can use the one thread for all four parts?