Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1’s title card is accompanied by the sound of John Debney’s Old West score swelling to a crescendo—an announcement of writer/director/star Kevin Costner’s epic intentions for this throwback oater, which is the maiden segment of a four-installment magnum opus. However, no matter that bellowing introduction or the fact that it runs a whopping three hours long, the Oscar-winner’s first behind-the-camera effort since 2003’s Open Range feels surprisingly small, slender, and scattershot. A multi-pronged look at the Civil War-wracked 1860s, it’s a stab at widescreen grandeur that’s so expansive and incomplete that it resembles a modern television series awkwardly edited into feature form.
The fact that Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1 recalls TV is a bit ironic, considering that Costner’s dedication to the project was part of the reason he stepped away from his smash hit Yellowstone. More startling still, the filmmaker’s latest is far less cinematic than Taylor Sheridan’s contemporary Western. Despite one or two serviceable vistas of riders galloping along the dusty, unforgiving plains, Costner forgoes the sweeping panoramas that have long galvanized the finest of the genre, including his own celebrated Dances with Wolves. In purely visual terms, his film feels cramped and unimaginative, full of too many pedestrian camera set-ups and tight close-ups that deny the picture the majestic scope it demands.
What it lacks in cinematographic splendor, Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1 compensates for with soundtrack bombast and narrative bloat. In the San Pedro Valley circa 1859, a rider searches for a frontier town called Horizon, only to discover that the reason he missed it during his trot through the territory is that it’s an unsettled stretch of land whose surveyors are now corpses. Once they’re buried, this man opts to take up the strangers’ cause, and years later, Horizon is a fledgling settlement. Unfortunately, it’s smack dab in the middle of Apache country, and hostile Native American warrior Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) decides to ravage the community, resulting in a prolonged siege during which the settlers are fatally overrun—save, that is, for Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter Lizzy (Georgia MacPhail), who survive by taking shelter in an underground tunnel where they use a rifle barrel to breathe topside air.
