Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1

In the middle of Kevin Costner’s sprawling badass Parade of Westerns-style ‘Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, there’s a segment with a brief speech from one of the actors, Danny Huston. Set in 1863, two years after the Civil War, this character, a military colonel at a fort in the Southwest, is speaking about a settlement, Horizon.

The settlement had recently been sacked and burned by Apaches with great loss of settler lives. The only thing you need to see is the land, explains the colonel, and you will know why these peoples will want to settle more and more.

“Just keep in mind that to us, that is what pushed us to cross the ocean to this country in the first place.”

While giving this tribute to Manifest Destiny, Huston, an apparently large man with a deep, grave and sometimes rich sounding voice, speaks with dry detachment. His the words remember it sure from a meaningful try, yet this mention of American expansionism remains rather like an unattached balloon, with no relation to history or any ideology.

Taking this nod into account and the structure of the film, the presence of a large cast of characters, many of whom are presented as the lead character, Chruchers in multiple storylines and with almost three hours of the total time, one can assume that Costner will provide some more substance, value or, let’s say, anything at all.

Yet all that can be gleaned from “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1,” which comes before the name of his encautiously advertised tetralogy about Igor who decided to build a cathedral, is that the countryside was nice and extensive and everybody was keen on having a bit of it.

“Chapter 1” marks Costner’s directorial return after 10 years since his took the directorial stool in his Western movie ‘Open Range’ released in 2003. This is a serious historical Western movie that tells the story of free grazing cattle men and a rich rancher.

What is really striking about that film, in addition to the variety of the visual narrative which borrowed pieces from so many sources — John Ford, Clint Eastwood, Sam Peckinpah and others — is how Respect attempts to tackle the western he so admires by invoking a tragic violent cowboy, the western concept he knows how to upend.

An approximately four-legged version of that same man – rough around the edges yet immensely pleasant, taciturn yet with a clear command over a high-powered rifle and slightly lesser over little ladies, and now suggested the name Hayes Ellison – rides into vision only about an hour in “Chapter 1” properly stands up, nearly perfect against blue sky.

Why does it take him so long? Because the movie behaves like a very long prelude, I think that because of the nature of the pro saga, Costner has timed his staring for a four part project as supposed to a one off film.

Thus, it’s rather difficult to see the significance of his being there, other than to signal history, play around with a quintessentially American film genre and build up the platform for the magnum opus which would commence proper when “Chapter 2” hits the screens in August.

Jonathan Baird and Costner brought us the book, “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1” and its subchapter have stunted line of actions which rushes from one end of the map southwest to the Territory of Wyoming. There is a segment with bad men who have good cheekbones in duster overcoats, which, remade, resemble animal skins of fallen gladiators, haunting a woman with Jena Malone, who plays quite convincingly a righteous terrorist.

Eventually, those people find themselves in some godforsaken outpost with muddy roads and drunken crooked pale, where the character named Hayes rides in with some gold and comes out with a whore named Marigold Abbey Lee. In the other part where Luke Wilson is, he is in charge of the wagon train and consists of hardy Americans, Laplander thugs and two English idiots who are simply asking for trouble.

The only part of the story that moves in any dramatic direction involves the settlement, which is a small hamlet situated on the banks of the river and at the center of the desert which has drawn a few people from the white mountain Apache including a certain Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz).

In a matter of seconds, a few John Ford good folk-like settlers are now waltzing each others somewhat reminiscent of a routine dance to fiddles; in just a skin of a minute, many lie dead, slain by their Apache counterparts.

Among the living are the recent bereaved Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) with her glossy nails and daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) who are unable to leave behind the fort. There they encounter and First Lieutenant Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington), who is gentle enough to call native Americans “Indigenous”.

The word Indigenous is perhaps the oldest term for the Native Americans. There is a shocking casualness in its use, even worse, by a white officer. He uses it here to pronounce Gephart’s sensitivities, and it somewhat conveys Costner’s own issues.

His most famous movie of course and probably ever would be “Dances With Wolves”, the epic in which he is a white union lieutenant who has relations with some Lakota people and which he both directed and acted, released in the year 1990.

Interestingly, “Dances” begins in the 1860s, which is the time period of most of “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1.” In this regard, at this particular point of Costner’s latest saga, the war and it’s fissures – distress at this point would be implicit around the borders of the narrative.

Instead, the violence that defines “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1” and gives its sprawl some sharp contours takes place during two separate episodes of mass slaughter, the first of which occurs in hellish night in Horizon on one of the evenings when the town’s peasantry has gone out to dance.

Apache people, who have settled in the vicinity and are eager to protect their ancestral land, set the town ablaze in what would be vivid destruction captured largely through Costner’s camera which attempts to maintain a neutral perspective.

Quite the opposite, the second slaughter – which is executed by a band of the surviving citizens of the Horizon and bounty hunters against yet another tribe – will primarily be on a white boy’s perspectives. He’s a ship’s boy of scourge of desperate people and as this slaughter continues, he throws his head down and collapses down onto the ground to both knees sobbing bitterly.

The raid is motivated by utility and avarice: for every Native Scalp there is a fat reward. The posse has been tracking the Apache who slaughtered Horizon, but when its members reach the conclusion that enemies’ scalps are valid currency, they pounce upon an entirely different tribe.

The reward, of scalps in particular, and of men’s violent intentions in general, presumes the violence which is more of a holocaust in the making and to the capitalistic factors of the nation. However, even though the butchery is unnaturally in the plot and even more plots overweights on characters’ butchery Novel: The butchery is in here, the target isn’t.

Instead, by bookending it with two massacres, he creates a symmetrical structure which in essence is unbalanced. For one, there isn’t a Native child as an eyewitness, looking away from the white child who is supposed to be an audience proxy who later looks away from the screen.

At the same time, subtlety on the matter always comes too, as both parties, ‘the settlers and the Native Americans’ may carry portions of blame and this is the simplest explanation, at best, which bathes all. The anticipation of ‘Chapter 2’, though may release authors from this backtracking perspective which helps create an order. Costner is filming the third part; the picture of when and even whether the forth film will take place remains unclear.

I would wish that it does even if “Horizon” is wildly uneven, at times exasperating and filled with distracting details that eat away at its period realism. Of other matters, no one seems to be able to spit tobacco properly and judging by the women’s impeccable updos and groomed eyebrows, every frontier has a stylist accompanying them.

It’s easy to scoff at these and other screw ups; similarly, speechmaking is one of Costner’s weaknesses as a filmmaker. Yet, he knows westerns, knows the landscapes of westward expansion, and woven into the few cringing moments is an entirely excellent sequence in which, chased by two riders around an incredibly photogenic moonlit sky and even more photogenic thundering hooves, one of the riders switches cuts the horse mid pursuit.

Shot to sound and structured, theatre, more than any movement, was startling in its heady booty-thumper, somatrix, deadpan vice, motion pictures from better westerns is what it comes to regarding Cosine what he can do as a director. Not that he does not like westerns, quite to the contrary, and this makes you understand thankful of whatever landscape – rugged, numbly resilient, hopelessly lost, redemptive even worth seeing.

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