Rent Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 on Amazon Video (paid link)
Written by: Jon Baird & Kevin Costner (screenplay), Jon Baird & Kevin Costner and Mark Kasdan (story)
Directed by: Kevin Costner
Starring: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone, Giovanni Ribisi, Danny Huston, Abbey Lee, Michael Rooker, Luke Wilson, Will Patton, Jeff Fahey
Rated: R
Watch the trailer
Plot
Chronicles a multi-faceted, fifteen year span of pre-and post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the American west.
Verdict
It's ambitious, longing to follow in the footsteps of classic westerns. It's also quite long and full of many characters with no clear goals which makes distinguishing them difficult. This needed to take more time to develop protagonists. This misses the fundamental aspect of establishing characters with a goal. Multi-part movies often feel like only a portion of the story to their detriment. This feels like a portion of the story from the middle. The length of this movie alone lends itself to a series, and there are three more movies planned after this one. The setting and landscapes are wonderful, contributing to a big story, but with such a broad view of the frontier, several of the plot points seem cliche and overused. What could have been an interesting series, is shortened to fit this format.
It depends.
Review
This is the first of four planned installments. Chapter 2 is scheduled for release in late 2024 while Chapter 3 will start filming mid-year. Chapter 4 is in development.
A couple of people survey frontier land, staking their claim. This plot of land will become the town, Horizon. An unspecified amount of time later, they're found dead, killed by Apache. We see a number of scenes, and it's unclear how they connect. This movie isn't far from a collections of vignette of the frontier depicting common Western tropes where Native Americans are the bad guys.
An early scene depicts an attack on Horizon. It feels like something that would happen later in the movie after establishing the characters and stakes. While I feel bewildered, like the characters, it's a different kind of confusion. I don't know these characters or even if these are main or supporting.
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| Kevin Costner plays Hayes Ellison |
This wants to be, and is, an epic. It's a grand scale and every landscape shot reinforces that. It needs a clearer direction. We need main characters to follow through the scenes, or this needs to do a great job of establishing a number of smaller characters to create a vivid look of the West. Unfortunately this movie frequently defaults to cliche Western stories which is disappointing.
I appreciate this wants to create a broad story about life on the frontier. The commitment to the production is impressive, but this has a few different plot lines and none of them are gripping. This doesn't need to be traditional, but it needs a direction. As the stories start to take shape, the focus seems rather typical; an attack on a frontier town, a call girl wooing a horse trader, and wagon train. At one point, the military comes in and tells the people of Horizon they shouldn't have started a settlement there. The land doesn't belong to them and attacks will persist. That's a great starting point, and I wish the stories centered around that idea. Knowing these characters and their motivations would also help. There's a somewhat comedic sequence with a soldier interested in a woman, and the tone is completely different from the rest of the movie. The posh British couple on the wagon train is a cliche story point. They misuse resources and they get a polite rebuke. I expected a trouncing. This is life and death. The problem with most characters is the lack of depth.
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| Luke Wilson plays Matthew Van Weyden |
This feels like it should be a series with how it introduces characters so late in the movie. Episodes would also afford this the opportunity for development. There are so many ideas crammed into one movie. That's just this one movie. There are three more after this.
It's ambitious and a throwback, but it's not much more than a collection of sequences. The only link is flyers for the town Horizon. There are so many underdeveloped characters that for the first half of the movie they're not easily distinguishable. This ends with a montage of what I assume is a preview of things to come. I had high anticipations for this, but it feels like a series that was cut to fit into a movie
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