Kevin Costner quit Yellowstone to make Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One. Photo / Paramount
Kevin Costner quit Yellowstone to make Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One. Photo / Paramount
Movie review: Kevin Costner sure has been a long time in the saddle. His own history with westerns goes back to 1985′s excellent Silverado before his own Oscar-winning 1990 frontier tale Dances with Wolves, and many a horse opera since. Lots of them – like 2003′s Open Range, his previoustime in the director’s chair – have been great. In recent years, he’s been starring in the contemporary cowboy drama Yellowstone, a kind of Dallas for MAGA folk.
But he walked away from it to make Horizon, a planned magnum opus about how the west was won. He had hoped it would be four chapters. The first is three hours long. It’s not great. It’s an extended scene-setter. It takes place in many locations – from Montana to Arizona – and involves folk doing their bit for America’s manifest destiny in the 1860s.
Costner turns up in a very big hat, or a small tepee, about an hour in to rescue a prostitute and a kid from a bad dude. Elsewhere, there is an Apache raid on a white settlement, which leaves Sienna Miller the least grief-stricken widow in movie history; a settler’s wagon train in the Santa Fe trail led by Luke Wilson and various other story strands lost in the mists of a film seemingly edited with a very blunt tomahawk, then dragged behind a wagon for some distance.
Just when you think you might have figured who exactly is who in the Costner-verse, the last part becomes an extended trailer for future chapters, featuring characters who are yet to arrive.
Horizon is well named. It’s flat, distant and goes on forever. Some who think they don’t make ‘em like they used to may well like it. The problem is Kev doesn’t make them like Kev used to, either.
Ratings out of five: ★★
Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One, directed by Kevin Costner, is in cinemas now.
