Over sixty years ago, directors Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall got together to cover the congressman’s perspective on United States expansion towards the pacific. “How The West Was Won” was a great task. With the three-strip Cinerama, it had an extensive cast of high-wattage stars James Stewart, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Thelma Ritter and many, many more and a canvas that seemed wider than the country itself. Its narrative is one about (white) will to subjugate the land, its indigenous population, and each other. It suffers from its overscale, numerous antithetical concepts, and ambitious ideas turned into sophomorism. Still, there is a certain mystique to the sheer chutzpah of trying it in the first place.
For actor Kevin Costner, the ontology of the picture must have certainly given him some inspiration when he was working on his ambitious directorial comeback, that being “Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One”, a three hour long attempt to right the wrongs of the past but sadly isn’t any better than the film that it’s been compared to.
“Horizon” isn’t subverting the genre of Westerns because it does rely on many tropes and clichés. It’s also a slow build of intertwining tales which is very slow to set the ball rolling that Costner doesn’t appear on screen until an hour into the movie.
However, the first one third of the film, which is almost one third of the film, moves too slowly and serves no purpose other than to weaken the overall product and structure of this film which does not stand out as a narrative. Chapter one also manages to deceive us further by ending with what looks like a montage of clips for future characters, which suggests the idea of amazing films that we may in the future but not find within this film.
In a very similar fashion, Chapter one narrates the events of the year 1859 in San Pedro Valley. A white family, who is only surveying their land by the river, is slaughtered brutally by the Native American Apache tribes who do not take very kindly to seeing white intruders on their native land. However, these deaths do not appear to discourage any more in migrating to the plains and finally into a settlement which had to be protected by armed settlers. As night fell, and the villages were in action at a festive town dance, the Apache tribes return to launch an assault: in a hellish display of chaos, the Apache natives initiate a grossly graphic, sickening massacre of the town, which consists of grease and very loud and violent screams, because it has been made matter of fact in the film. Most, but not all of the townspeople, manage to escape alive. Some want revenge on those who harmed them. Others, such as Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail) and her mother Frances (Sienna Miller), were evacuated with the Union Army commanded by Lieutenant.
Trent Gephardt, played by Sam Worthington, manages to get back to the fortified area and experience relative peace.
The characters do not evoke sympathy even after witnessing all the horrific scenes of bloodshed thanks to one hour of the movie. They are separate characters with no immediate apparent links and are only sort of related towards the very end of the movie. Quite quickly, the viewers are brought for a tour of Wyoming Territory and introduced to yet more new faces, this time, Costner finally makes his entrance in the film in the guise of Hayes Ellison, a horse trader, and other things well. He develops a friendship with Marigold, who is a local prostitute whose life is in jeopardy because of a secret she possesses which makes her the target of a group of thugs. The series picks up a small pulse when the character of Costner, with his low rumbling voice, enters the screen. Of course, this occurs but only as a side note to other events in the play. As if Costner the film director and writer, who co-authored the script with Jon Baird, understands how much he has to take on about the introduction of all the main characters. In the first place of course, such a portrayal cannot do justice to the character that Costner is.
The concluding segment which is presented in the last hour is the peak: It revolves around young Abraham Lincoln making his way with a strange group of people through the Montana territory. The leader of this band of travelers, Luke Wilson, turns out to be the best in this lot as well. He is more than a ghost of the western stereotype; Luke infuses Matthew Van Weyden with an element of reality that is woefully missing from the show.
Because for all of Costner’s desire to remain unbiased regarding giving equal importance to the voices of the natives as well as the settlers, it does not work out fully. We do meet the members of the Apache warriors family, however, their on-screen presence is dwarfed by their white counterparts. It does not help that the white women characters are, in many cases, so pristine and bright not a speck of dust on them even when they are amongst their filthy setting that they look like angels on screen. As for the scores it is equally revealing: It is a beautiful, sweeping, booming Old Hollywood sound that reserved the most favorable tones for the film’s white personalities.
Costner does at least make a gesture toward including a diverse cast by recognizing the presence of Black people and Chinese immigrants who were also a part of the history of the West, moving across the wide, rich in visuals scenery captured by DP J. Michael Muro.
Although “Horizon” raises the idea of a possible conspiracy–a nameless publisher circulated pamphlets offering a land of plenty which is mainly devoid of life–I still can’t help imagining the picture “How The West Was Won”. That western, in particular, was unable to escape the weight of its conception time and genre formulas such as the introduction of clumsy and forced romantic plots. The times are here for a more “enlightened” version of “Horizon” especially in the wake of Martin Scorsese’s “Killer of the Flower Moon” and works produced by indigenous filmmakers like “Reservation Dogs”, “Wild Indian”, “The Body Remembers When the World Broken Open”, “Beans” etc. That presence put even greater pressure on Costner. And at the moment, Costner is still struggling to shed the image of the man who directed “Dances with Wolves”. Yes, for better or worse, this director does live here and is present in every inch of this blustering epic.
While the first installment of the possible “Horizon” series does perform well in presenting bases for subsequent films, preserving the enthusiasm which Costner managed to accumulate prior to leaving “Yellowstone”, this one picture is really a pain to watch. It seldom provides them with the pleasures they so impatiently await: Costner on the horse on the open range.
The film gives us no iconic images apart from Costner: I am at a loss to recall the name of even one character without glancing at my notes. It seems a serious error to rely on the hypothetical effect of future works in order to achieve the idea as whole. Horizon lingers on “over-explaining: and “over-developing” far too many of its standout features.
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