I’m a long-time admirer of Kevin Costner.
As an actor, he has been excelling on the big screen for four decades and on the small screen playing a gruff, tough family patriarch. yellowstone park This is a big reason why the show has been so successful over the past five years. Meanwhile, Costner’s work behind the scenes is never less than interesting. Whatever its contemporary reputation, dances with wolves Still a powerful Hollywood epic. Costner’s much-maligned adaptation postman It’s a mess, but it’s a fascinating curiosity and an ambitious solo venture from a filmmaker determined to make it big on the big screen.
So it’s with great sadness that I say that Costner’s latest film, Horizon: An American Legend – Chapter 1, almost unwatchable. I say “very close” because I actually saw it. Somehow. only. I’m here to warn you away.
You shouldn’t let yourself succumb to this movie. Not even if you like westerns. Not even if you like Costner. Not even dances with wolves is your favorite movie of all time. Even if you watch all five seasons in one go yellowstone park six times. Costner’s dreary three-hour prologue is interminable, irredeemable, and utterly impossible to care about. The word “hard work” rarely describes a movie so aptly. “Chapter One” has been tacked onto the title because if Costner has his way, there will be three more chapters.
that’s right: Horizon: An American Legend – Chapter 1, the first in an anticipated four-part series, each of which will be presumably as long and interminable as this one. The second part has been filmed and is scheduled to be released later this summer. I can’t imagine enduring this, let alone going through it twice again some year in the future.
best you can say horizonChapter 1 is, like Costner’s better work, ambitious and personal, the kind of big-screen blockbuster Costner has been trying to make for years and financed largely from his own pocket of. Set against the backdrop of Americans’ westward migration in the mid-1800s and spanning much of the U.S. frontier, the film depicts land conflicts between U.S. citizens and Native Americans, and whether and how different peoples can or should live together. Competing visions.
The sprawl and scope of this movie is huge, like both movies dances with wolves and yellowstone park, which showcases some truly stunning views. But the story offers a bunch of shrug-worthy characters and a confusing plot, none of which tie together or pay off.
On top of that, the sheer amount of characters and plot weighs the film down. Costner plays Hayes Ellison, a raspy-voiced horse dealer with marksmanship, but he doesn’t appear until an hour into the film. He’s the best part of the movie, but he seems lost in the mountain of roles.
Two hours pass, and entirely new locations, characters, and plots—most of which could probably support their own regular-length feature films—continue to emerge, as if Costner had set out to document the lives of every settler he met in the 1800s Mid-1990s adventure western. When you sit down to watch a movie with the subtitle “American Legend,” you don’t really expect it to try to tell the story of every American. but. The cast list is like a census of a small country. I’ve long been a critic of overpopulation fears, but at least with this movie, I’ve changed my mind.
The film’s ambitious subtitle, coupled with marketing suggesting it’s about the making of modern America, suggests an interest in capturing a key moment in the transformation of the American West. This fits with Costner’s obsession: dances with wolveshis character, a young Civil War officer, wants to travel to the frontier to see it before it disappears. yellowstone parkCostner-produced “” tells the story of the struggle to keep the area’s natural beauty intact.
but horizonThe convoluted sprawl makes it hard to pinpoint what the film is trying to say: plots keep cropping up like weeds in a garden; it’s unclear what’s driving it, other than the ambition to include the entire American West in the production The development of this film. Some of the actors – Will Patton, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson – are familiar enough that you’ll remember their faces, but the characters themselves are too vague and thinly drawn. The film seems to promise that, over time, you’ll eventually get to know them. As the film goes on, this promise seems more like a threat.
Making a three-hour movie that effectively utilizes its full running time is difficult, but not impossible. In fact, Costner’s own dances with wolvesIt deftly demonstrates how to pace and structure a feature-length film by telling an intimate story surrounding its characters and methodically building conflict.
but horizon It feels like the first few shaky episodes of a TV series. It’s all set up and introduced, and the promise of a complex narrative pays off, after you’ve invested a dozen hours or more of your time over several years. The movie seems to be saying, hang in there and good things will come eventually. It will be a journey, like the West itself. If this is what Costner wants to do with his star and wealth, then I wish him the best. Go west, old man. But I won’t be on this journey with you.
