Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
Over sixty years ago, directors Henry Hathaway, John Ford, and George Marshall joined forces to tell the story of America’s push toward the Pacific. “How The West Was Won” was a tremendous undertaking. Produced through the three-strip Cinerama process, it featured a deep ensemble of high-wattage stars—James Stewart, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, Thelma Ritter, and many, many more—and a canvas that seemingly stretched further than the country itself. Its story is one of (white) perseverance to conquer the land, the people already inhabiting it, and each other. It suffers from its grand scale, competing visions, and regressive politics. And yet, there is a mystique to the very audacity of attempting it.
For actor Kevin Costner, the film must surely have been at the forefront of his mind while making his ambitious directorial return—“Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1,” a three-hour work attempting to rewrite past wrongs while suffering from the same glut that afflicted the film it most recalls.
“Horizon” isn’t trying to subvert the Western, relying on many well-worn tropes. It’s also a slow build of intersecting stories that takes so long to get going that Costner doesn’t even appear on screen until an hour in. Instead the first third of “Horizon” is merely a long preamble, a structural decision indicative of a film grinding and failing to prove itself as a standalone feature. The sizzle reel that ends Chapter One, in fact, featuring a library of clips and characters for future movies, does well to tease the kind of high-motoring film we could get but don’t necessarily find here.
Rather, Chapter One limps into 1859 in San Pedro Valley. A family surveying a plot of land by a creek is gruesomely murdered by Apache warriors who are none too happy to find white outsiders on their land. These deaths, however, do little to deter more from coming to the point of settling in a town guarded by armed citizens. At nightfall, during a town dance, the Apache warriors return: the grisly, vicious massacre—backgrounded by rumbling flames and deafening screams—is frankly edited and bluntly composed to the point that it feels as normalized as breathing. A few of the townsfolk survive. Some decide to hunt down their attackers in a bid for revenge. Others like Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail) and her mother Frances (Sienna Miller) leave with the Union Army led by Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) to the relative safety of a fort.
Even with the cataclysmic scenes of death, the first hour does little to endear these characters. They’re bespoke people whose connections aren’t immediately clear and only become vaguely obvious toward the picture’s conclusion. Before long, we’re whisked away to the Wyoming Territory and introduced to some brand new characters: Costner finally appears as Hayes Ellison, a horse trader, among many other skills. He befriends local sex worker Marigold (a creaky Abbey Lee), who is hunted by a band of gunmen because of a secret she’s hiding. The series gains a minor pulse once Costner, featuring a gruff, low voice, appears on screen. But even when he does appear, he feels like an afterthought. As though Costner, the filmmaker and writer (he co-wrote the script with Jon Baird), knows how tall of a task he has introducing all of his main players. Consequently, the power of his presence is left limited to the film’s detriment.
