Kevin Costner Goes West with ‘Horizon’

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Kevin Costner loves westerns. He directed and starred in Dances with Wolves (1990), unusual back then for working with Native Americans instead of against them, and Open Range (2003), a blood-soaked story of conflict among ranchers. He returns to the genre with Horizon: An American Saga, a four-parter that will remind film historians of the western serials that once occupied cinemas on Saturday afternoons. They were stories of roundups and rustlers told through a series of low-budget flicks. However, Horizon is costly and mounted on a grander scale. Chapter One is in theaters. 

Horizon opens as a surveyor pounds stakes into the dry ground of the San Pedro Valley in 1859. He’s calculating the division and sale of the land, once the common ground for Apache hunters, with plans to build a town called Horizon. They are observed by a pair of Native boys, puzzled by their measurements, but the warriors coming from behind their overlook understand altogether too well what’s going on. The surveyor and his sons pay for their intrusion with their lives. They won’t be the last to die on that site. 

Like most Americans of his generation, Costner was fed a steady diet of westerns in his boyhood, and when he came of age, he absorbed the revisionist westerns of the late ‘60s that refused to clean up the violence and sometimes called to question America’s “manifest destiny” to “win the West.” Horizon appears influenced by both kinds of westerns. The Apache attack on the village (encampment, really) of Horizon (built despite the surveyor’s death) is as thrilling—and settler-centric—as anything by John Ford. It’s a massacre sparing no one—not women, not children or even the fiddle player. But Costner also sympathizes with the Natives. In a subtle, wordless moment, the faces of Native women and children tell all as the surviving warriors return. Their husbands and fathers died in the assault. 

The story lurches inelegantly forward and from place to place, year to year, and can be as slowly drawn as a wagon train. Horizon only begins to find its center of gravity with the arrival—an hour in—of Costner’s character. He says he’s a horse trader and chooses his words with a gunfighter’s careful aim. He channels Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name and channels him well. 

Although the editing is a mess, Horizon is commendable for giving space for multiple perspectives. The Apaches are divided between a young militant determined to fight and the elder who realizes that the white tide is too strong. Among the settlers are decent folk as well as psychotics. A cavalry lieutenant warns the survivors of the Horizon massacre not to rebuild—their village is indefensible—and even offers a word of concern for the Natives. He’s overruled by his regimental commander. The virgin land, as the colonel sees it, is a prize that will be taken one way or another by Americans dreaming of a new life on the frontier. It’s a land of hope and opportunity, and it ain’t pretty. 

Horizon: An American Saga Chapter Two opens in August.