Film Review - Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 (2024)

Horizon is a new western epic by Kevin Costner (no stranger to the genre with Dances with Wolves and Yellowstone to name some examples) and concerns the town of Horizon during the 1860’s which is burnt down by an Indian attack, the film then follows a number of storylines including one with Costner himself, another with Sam Worthington and Sienna Miller and another one regarding a posse who wants to hunt down the Indians.

Horizon was a movie I was keen to see as I am a big Yellowstone fan and Costner’s commitment to this project (one he’s had in his mind since 1988) was partially responsible for holding up Part 2 of Season 5 of that series then the previews for this movie came out and it looked interesting.

But sadly this movie is a bit of a disappointment for me but before I delve into that I want to talk about the good stuff and this movie is very well crafted, Costner’s direction is very self assured and the many landscape shots reminded me of Dances with Wolves (which would win a cinematographer Oscar for that great sun of South Australia Dean Semler) at times and J. Michael Muro’s cinematography does a great job of showing off the wild west of the American frontier, John Debney’s music is also good even if at times it sounds a little heavy handed.

And the film has a range of good performances, Jena Malone is good in a small role as is Worthington and Miller and they have good chemistry together in some of the films more romantic scenes and I also enjoyed seeing Will Patton show up as it sometimes doesn’t feel like a Kevin Costner western without him.

But what dragged this movie down for me was a similar situation that I had when I first saw the Fellowship of the Ring in the early 2000’s in that it was a movie that went for 3 hours and when it was over I felt like I was cheated a little bit in that it was a film that ultimately went nowhere and did very little with such a long runtime though I didn’t feel that way with Dune Part One in 2021 funnily enough.

And also at times the films pacing is a little off, it will spend some time on one story line and start to get interesting and then it would cut away to another storyline and I felt like “Awww man come on, I was enjoying the previous storyline” and it made the film at times feel a bit disjointed to watch which again Dune Part One and Fellowship of the Ring didn’t suffer from though I will say the glimpse of Chapter 2 shown at the end of the film did look very promising.

And so that was Horizon An American Saga Chapter 1 and it was a bit of a letdown for me but it did also show promising signs of things to come and if Dune Part Two and The Two Towers are any guide, Chapter 2 will make Chapter 1’s long and at times laborious setup feel worthwhile, 2 and a half out of 5.