Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024)

January 16, 2025 10:21 AM

Kevin Costner's first chapter in a multi-film story depicting a history of the American West, which focuses on events occurring in the Wyoming and Montana territories to the north and those situated around hopeful dreams of establishing a town called Horizon in the Southwest.

Hulu describes the film as:

Spanning the four years of the Civil War, from 1861 to 1865, Chapter 1 of director and star Kevin Costner's epic western saga chronicles an emotional journey across a country at war with itself, experienced through the lens of families, friends, and foes all attempting to discover what it truly means to be the United States of America.

Siskel and Ebert.com interviewed Costner about this film and the project in June, 2024.

Purportedly based on a budget of $50,000,000, Horizon: Chapter 1 brought in just $34,000,000 in global ticket sales, severely hampering Costner's plan to release three more subsequent films as part of a grand cinematic telling of the events that shaped the modern American West. Additionally, the film received mixed reviews from critics. On Letterboxed.com, the film has a 3.0 star rating out of 5. On Metacritic, the film scored 49 out of 100 with a user score of 6.9 out of 10.

Chapter 2 is complete and in the can, but there is not a release date currently set for the film after the box office failure of the first.

The film is currently streaming on Netflix, as well as Hulu and Max. It can also be rented on other platforms.

Content Warning: there is a depiction of the death of children (not graphically but occurring off screen), along with gun violence.

posted by Atreides (4 comments total)

Faced with a need to watch something lengthy while trapped in a monotonous task (exercising), I decided to watch Horizon. Maybe it was the low expectations from pretty healthy fusillade of so so to negative reviews of the film, the criticisms of it being Costner's vanity project, but I came out on the other side of the three hour long plus film thinking it was just fine. Not without issues, but as a Western, it was fine.

It's easier to talk about what wasn't great about the film. One part was not really giving the Native Americans a voice before introducing them attacking and attempting to wipe out settlers. Or, even before that, killing a survey team for a new town (Horizon), and at some point, killing a boy who was there with his father. In essence, Costner intentionally or not, seemed to lean into depicting the stereotypical "savage" that the settlers and American 20th Century media drew upon to justify the taking of the western land. Later in the film, he gives them a voice, and depicts brutal white savagery against an indigenous village entirely for the sake of making money, but the film could have benefited a lot from balancing the introductions.

He does have a cavalry officer show up and basically tell the surviving settlers, "Well what did you expect was going to happen? This is their land you decided to settle down on!"

This was probably the biggest issue I had with the film. The next, and not so nearly a big issue, was Costner's decision to essentially wrap two films into one. There are two stories that encompass Chapter 1, the story of a powerful family in the Montana Territory seeking revenge against a woman who tried to kill the patriarch and fled with their son (this is Costner's storyline) and the other is the story of people who live or want to live around a bend in the river that has been promoted as the town of Horizon. This involves the Native Americans, the settlers, and a wagon train on its way. A better film would have focused on one, either one, but not both, because they both kind of suffer from losing more time to breath and tell the stories they're trying to tell. It seems clear that the "northern" story will lead to Horizon, but that's only something that comes to a head at the very end of it (and the film).

What does Costner do well? Film the movie, for the most part, taking advantage of buttes and blue skies and clouds. Set design seems to be on the spot, as well as the other production values. The acting is mostly fine. The story is fine, too, though treads over stories we already know, which in way kind of cheapen the film in the sense of, "I've seen this before." I've told others that I felt that Horizon would have been a great miniseries on TV, but as a film, not so much. Purportedly, he had wanted to make these films since Dances with Wolves, and had this film come up in the 90s, I think it would have been received better.

I'm interested enough to watch Chapter Two whenever it pops along, but low expectations are the best way to appreciate the first chapter.
posted by Atreides at 1:00 PM on January 16 [2 favorites]

One of the worse films I've seen in the theater, but there are elements that have kept me continuing to think about it and have interest in seeing a sequel. The whole is worse than the sum of its parts, I've concluded. Beautiful and great job of showing Western landscapes, and I supposed it's refreshing to see an attempt to tell a story from American history in a time when the only films these days are SF/Superheros/Horror/CGI animation. So many stories and characters were introduced that by the end I had difficulty remembering who was who; there may be some part of my brain still wanting to evaluate those characters on their remaining arcs.

I expect, if Costner gets to make and release all 4 parts, a 3-hour cut of the eventual 12-hour films would be pretty good.
posted by Theiform at 1:57 PM on January 16 [2 favorites]

"The whole is worse than the sum of its parts" is a good way to put it. Maybe that's why my instinct was "break this damn thing up!" The ending didn't help when Costner decided to drop a montage of things that he had already filmed like a "coming soon!" segment. I read in an interview that he was constantly cutting and editing the film, right up to its premiere at Cannes, and these weren't small edits, he was struggling to decide if it should be five minutes longer, 10 minutes longer, 10 minutes shorter and so on. He definitely did not have a super clear vision of his story.
posted by Atreides at 7:18 AM on January 17 [1 favorite]

Also, I'm not sure what to make of the fact that this film apparently received a 7-minute-long standing ovation at Cannes when it appeared!
posted by Theiform at 12:45 PM on January 17