With Horizon: An American Saga. The aim is not just one film, but a tetralogy of films retracing American history and the conquest of the West.

Despite having been relegated to the status of an extinct genre decades ago, the Western continues to make its way through the screen. Punctuated by a few resurgences among the general public, such as Django Unchained and The Revenant, the success of the Western is becoming increasingly meager. Nevertheless, the genre never seems to have lost its pioneering reputation as the original and founding genre of American cinema. It’s the genre on which the United States first recounted its great exploits and adventures, like Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail in 1930, starring John Wayne. From Wayne, the Western went on to build legendary actors, first Clint Eastwood and then, at the end of the Century, Kevin Costner.

These last two actors seem to be the last bastions and emblems of the Western in the eyes of the public, the last actors for whom audiences would flock to cinemas to rediscover the great West. Watching Kevin Costner take on a gamble as risky as Horizon should therefore be carefully observed.

Costner’s ambitions for the film are announced right from the title, Horizon : An American Saga. The aim is not just one film, but a tetralogy of films retracing American history and the conquest of the West. With its $100 million budget and $38 million from Costner’s own pocket. It would be no exaggeration to describe this project as a mad gamble, a last and final attempt to revive the genre from its grave in a gigantic spectacle. Although the first part of the project is ambitious, it unfortunately lacks cohesion.

Over its 181-minute running time, Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 features a large cast of characters. In an almost episodic fashion, the film devotes 1 hour of its running time to each location, with its own characters, intrigues and conflicts. Determined by their geographical location (Wyoming, Arizona and Montana), each plot tells a different facet of American history in the second half of the 1800s. The cohabitation between Native Americans and white settlers, the Civil War, the development of towns and order in the West. This episodic model of presentation is double-edged: on the one hand, it renews the dynamic of our viewing by introducing us to new characters every hour, and lessens the weight of a 3-hour film. But on the other hand, it never leaves us time to fully immerse ourselves in each plot and its consequences. Costner’s plot seems underdeveloped in this first film, and we know far too little about his character and the reasons that drive him. While he carries with him the character of the lonely man with reasons that only he knows, it’s still too little to engage and invest us in his protective relationship with Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller). The same comment could be made for the character of Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington), although more developed than Costner’s, his plot and relationships seem rushed to contain themselves in a single film. Nevertheless, Horizon is keen to tackle the strong subjects of the time, and from different, opposing points of view. The cohabitation of natives with the gradual and sometimes violent arrival of settlers on their territory is the film’s strong feature. The differences in behavior towards the settlers are dealt with within the Indian clans themselves. Unfortunately, the time devoted to other subjects, such as the Civil War and social class differences, seems to be too little explored in this first film to make a lasting impression.

Visually, Horizon never falls short. Magnified by large, rolling landscapes during the Costner-led plot, cinematographer J. Michael Muro also captures our attention during action scenes. During a nighttime Comanche attack early in the film, Muro captures the chaos, violence and fear reigning in the settler village. The tension is also heightened by the editing work of Miklos Wright, who knows how to slow down the film before the start of an armed confrontation or speed up the pace of the montage to show us characters in distress. With his camera, Costner captures all the landscapes that characterize the United States, its nature, grandeur and diversity. The three separate plots are an opportunity to capture independent settings and not simply summarize the conquest of the West in plains and deserts.

Horizon ends abruptly, leaving us with a long, drawn-out montage of what to expect in the second chapter of Costner’s saga. While it’s fair to criticize this montage for showing us too much about what’s to come, it does keep us intrigued for this second part, which looks far more dynamic than the first.

It’s clear that Kevin Costner has a lot to tell with Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1, at the risk of losing viewers along the way due to its length and tangled plot. The ambition and immensity of the project could almost be more notable than the film itself. Despite its many flaws, we can only applaud Costner’s eagerness to offer such a considerable experience.