It’s been a long and difficult last few years for Kevin Costner in both his personal and professional career.

The man who was the face of the hit television show Yellowstone for Paramount for the last several years had a falling out with the creative brain trust of the show that devolved to the point where the actor did not show up for the show’s final season despite being the patriarch in mainstay.

On top of all that, details about a pretty long-drawn-out divorce did not help matters as Costner’s public persona has taken a hit over the last several years.  However, Costner has not been sitting around doing anything for that period.  Costner is the writer, producer, director, and star of a major western epic that is so big it has been split up into four cinematic chapters with the first one pushing over 3 hours of runtime.

In the course of such a massive project, Costner has also brought in a multitude of actors and actresses to help him tell the story of the western American states during the time of the Civil War.  The problem with that plan however is that Kevin Costner who isn’t a stranger to the Western genre may have Bitten are far more than he can chew with the first part of his project entitled Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1.

Horizon Chapter 1 is set during the early days of the beginning of the American Civil War.  However, the focus of this movie takes place in the unsettled west coast of the United States where American settlers are experiencing violent conflict with Native Americans, specifically the Apache tribe.

After a group of settlers attempt to call what they believe to be unclaimed land their home they are attacked in the middle of the night by a group of violent Apaches who kill their women and children and steal their weapons as a sign of strength that they are not welcome in the region.  In the aftermath of such an event, the US government takes the remaining settlers to a camp where they can guarantee their safety.

Meanwhile, in Montana territory, a young woman named Lucy shoots a man named James Sykes and flees with her young son Sam however Skyes survives the assault and sends his man to go find her. They cross paths with Costner’s character of Hayes and the town’s prostitute Marigold who flee from the onslaught of the men. This old-school style western begins to set up pieces of a much bigger story but may have bitten off more than it can chew. 

Well, one may be hesitant to be too harsh on Kevin Costner’s first outing with the Horizon Saga with part 2 just 6 weeks away, Chapter 1 is a head-scratching adventure in more ways than one.  After a very impressive and very heart-wrenching opening act that requires us to see the brutality of the native and settlers conflict. The thing that hurts the film moving forward is trying to string along an endless supply of characters and plot points that do not mesh well together.

Audiences should know this is a movie that stretches its runtime over 3 hours and the film introduces a multitude of characters and a multitude of storylines that could be declared overwhelming for its audience.

It’s impossible to explain the full complexity of the story in such a short period and the only way to explain it is to simplify it to this:  the date of Americans in The American Settlers hate each other,  a woman shoots her husband and steals their kid Who’s now under the care of the town’s prostitute and Gunslinger, several groups of people attempt to pick up the pieces of their life in various locations,  and somewhere along the way Luke Wilson appears for all of 2 minutes in a 3-hour movie.

Costner’s film is unfocused as it bounces around between multiple states and multiple stories that are crafted in a way that makes the audiences feel there’s no correlation between the stories. The film is like watching a 3-hour soap opera as the movie jumps from an a, b,  c, d plot. The only justification that this movie has is that part 2 is slated to come out in August; however, that puts the audience in an awkward position of waiting 6 weeks just to find out if the first  3 hours of this film were even worth the time invested.

For most mainstream audiences Horizon Chapter 1 will have them questioning what they watched rather than building up a genuine excitement for the next film.  The worst case scenario is that Chapter 1 was such a misfire that even fewer people will be motivated to see Chapter 2 along with the other two chapters to come afterward.

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is a passion project that Kevin Costner has been trying to sell Studios for 35 years. The first part of this chapter proves perhaps he should have listened to the studio executives who said no before investing 40 million of his own money before coming to that conclusion.

2/5

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