Horizon An American Saga
I’ve been pretty excited lately about what appears to be something of a Western revival. Kevin Costner’s upcoming tetralogy, Horizon: An American Saga, looks fantastic judging by the trailers (here and here). And Viggo Mortensen’s upcoming The Dead Don’t Hurt—which he wrote, directed, stars in and composed the music for—looks less epic but incredibly intense. Meanwhile, Taylor Sheridan has been putting out great shows like 1883 that really tap into the Western genre in ways that I vastly prefer to his more famous Yellowstone.
All we need is a new series like Deadwood and we’re in business. Maybe one more Clint Eastwood-directed Western, since Unforgiven remains one of the best in the genre. But I digress.
I’m here with bad news to temper the good. For all this Western revival talk, the final product needs to be compelling, draw audiences and win the hearts and minds of critics and moviegoers alike. Costner debuted the first part of his four-part movie anthology at the Cannes Film Festival in France and most critics panned the film. When I started reading reviews Monday morning, the movie sat at a dismal 17% on Rotten Tomatoes with just 6 reviews. When I came back Monday evening to write this post, that number had risen to 29%, with 14 reviews.
Clearly, the number will change as more reviews filter in and again when the movie comes out on June 28th (the second part releases in August). But this is not an auspicious start to Costner’s passion project, and that makes me a little sad, as I really wanted this to be his next Dances With Wolves or even Open Range. As it stands, it’s looking more like Wyatt Earp.
Of course, we must always take critic reviews with a grain of salt. Opinions differ. For the naysayers, the BBC’s Nicholas Barber writes that a film, and certainly a Western, “ needs to have a plot, a bit of credible characterisation, and a structure that preferably includes a beginning, middle and end. Horizon doesn't have any of those.”
He continues: “The most obvious problem with Horizon, then, is that the strands aren't tied together, but even taken individually, each section is dull and plodding, and full of stultifyingly slow dialogue scenes that spell out the issues but do nothing to establish the characters as human beings.”
This is a common refrain with reviewers. The movie feels like it’s trying to do too many things and doing each of them poorly. It’s too spread out among too many characters and storylines, and leaves the audience feeling empty and unsatisfied.
Many have said it feels like the setup to a mini-series. Not the mini-series itself, but just the setup for one, establishing backstory and characters and all the stuff you’d need to write the actual story that people would want to watch. There’s a “seemingly unending introduction of characters” writes Esther Zuckerman for The Daily Beast.
“I’m not sure why Costner didn’t turn this into the television project it so wishes to be,” she continues. “Perhaps he just wanted to one up Yellowstone, the wildly popular Taylor Sheridan show, on which he played John Dutton, and which he decided to leave controversially. But as a cinematic experience it is aggravating in multiple ways. If you're not mad at how offensively backward it all is, you’ll be pissed about all the stage setting.”
But not all critics disliked the film. Rory O’Connor of The Film Stage, calls the film “appealingly sincere” writing:
Everything that emerged in the lead-up to Horizon––the project’s scale, its runtime (181 minutes), the colon and hyphen in its title––has been pointing to one word; but calling something “epic” has less to do with quantity than some movies would like us to think. In the most sweeping sequences of Dances with Wolves, Costner left the character all alone on the plains, dwarfed by the landscape and increasingly aware of his own place in it. Horizon, by contrast, seldom takes that kind of time to think. There’s a distinct lack here, too, of cinematic urgency, the sense that, regardless of length, there is somewhere the film needs to get to. The resulting feeling of watching Horizon will be familiar to anyone who’s ever binged a prestige show; but if that is a snag the viewer’s willing to overcome, Costner leaves plenty to enjoy.
“Costner hasn’t forgotten where to point a camera,” he writes, “and outside all the table-setting, Horizon has moments designed to astonish.”
Much of the negativity seems to focus primarily on the fact that all the competing storylines—perhaps better-suited for TV—are left dangling by the end and the film feels incapable of standing on its own. I find this less worrisome simply because the second part releases in August and two more films are—hopefully—on the way. Of course that depends on the success of these first two parts, and Costner’s ability to raise money for the rest of the tetralogy.
The other piece of bad news, and one that may hurt Horizon at the box-office as much as the lousy reviews, is the 3 hour runtime. That’s a big ask for moviegoers and an even bigger one when it’s just the first part of a four-part series, and not an established IP like Lord Of The Rings.
I’ll be going on June 28th, long movie or no, and bad reviews be damned. A slower pace, a massive cast with sprawling storylines, all of that sounds fine to me. I might just have to go watch Lonesome Dove in the meantime.
