An Honest Assessment of Kevin Costner's 'Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1'

I may play a cynical entertainment writer/critic from a coastal blue state who geeks out over squares in a horror movie on the Internet, but off the interwebs, I’m also a middle-aged white man from a deep red state who got a little choked up when they called the firefighter who saved his family at that Trump rally a “girl dad.” That is to say, something happened to my brain at a certain age that transformed me into the sort of person who loves movies like Ford v Ferrari and television shows like, God help me, Yellowstone.

All that is to say that Horizon: An American Saga should be right up my alley. I like Kevin Costner; I like westerns. This is basically like Spielberg directing an alien movie set in the ’80s! How could it go wrong? So many ways!

Here’s the good: Costner really does a bang-up job directing. The action sequences are fantastic, the cinematography is gorgeous, and he did a nice job casting the film. The writing — from Costner and Jon Baird — is fine, too. It’s a little hokey or tin-eared here and there, but that’s not unexpected for a Western. The score is way too much, as well. Turn it down, Costner!

Costner traffics in all the right themes, too: It’s about settling the American West, manifest destiny, the ugly violence of men, and the conflict between the settlers and the Natives. He captures the tension that Natives must have felt between conceding land to avoid violence or sustaining massive casualties to protect land that many felt would inevitably be taken anyway. It’s a bleak situation for the Natives. It’s also not great for women, who have little agency as they travel across the Oregon Trail and must accede to the demands and poor decisions of men.

The actual problem with Horizon is that it’s not a movie. It’s a television show. Chapter 1 is three hours long, and it is not written as a self-contained story. There are a lot of characters, and a lot of different stories, and those stories are only just beginning when the movie ends. There are still new characters being introduced two hours into the film. Kevin Costner’s character doesn’t even emerge until after the first hour.
It feels like the first three episodes of a season of television, and that is by design because Costner has not only filmed Chapter 2 but has plans for Chapters 3 and 4, as well. Basically, he mapped out a full season of television and tried to turn it into a film and release it in theaters.

It bombed, as it should! Nobody wants to pay $15 plus concessions to watch the first three episodes when the rest of the series won’t be released for months or years or at all. Based on the box-office performance of Chapter 1, and the fact that Chapter 2 has been pulled from its August release date, it is highly unlikely we’ll see the conclusion of this season of movies. And who, anyway, would want to pay $60 plus concessions plus four trips to the theater (and potentially a babysitter) to watch what should be binged on Netflix over a weekend or two?

It’s insane! The film opens with a battle between a Native tribe and a group of settlers surveying the land that lasts a full 45 minutes. It’s nearly a third of the movie and we’ve barely gotten to know any of the characters. Then Costner moves to another plotline with different characters in another territory of the country. We never get to know any of these characters enough to want to return to the theater months later to continue their stories.

The whole thing is poorly conceived, and I don’t understand why no one said to Costner, “Hey Kevin! This looks great! We should find a streaming home for it!” Maybe Costner either felt like he couldn’t compete with his own television western, Yellowstone, or he thought he could one-up Taylor Sheridan by putting his television show in theaters. It makes no sense to me, nor why he would make what is essentially the Yellowstone prequel, 1883, on a similar budget (1883 reportedly cost $200-$300 million for one season). They’re similar stories set in similar periods. They’re similar enough that I kept expecting to hear Isabel May’s Elsa Dutton narrate the events of the film.

Maybe Costner thought he could reinvent the wheel here. Or maybe his ego is so huge that he thought audiences would take the time, money, and effort to go see his version of a Taylor Sheridan series in theaters in a genre that hasn’t done well in theaters in years. Maybe after Sheridan refused to take his notes on four seasons of Yellowstone, Costner just got fed up and said, “F**k it! I’ll make my own!” It’s inexplicable. But as the first three episodes of a television show, it’s a B+. As the first chapter of a four-part movie series that will never be finished, it’s a D-.

Take the movie, Kevin, cut it up, sell it to a streamer, and try again.