Kevin Costner directs himself, Sienna Miller and Abbey Lee in this western epic following the formation of a white township in unprotected Apache lands.

Considering the mere appearance of Costner on horseback in the trailer brought a tear to my eye a couple of months ago I might not be the most partisan voice to judge this. I have heard bullshit from professional reviewers that it looks like a mere miniseries for television. What are we comparing those lush big screen visuals to? The digital greenscreen fakery of Shogun or Game Of Thrones? The mega budget per episode of a Westworld? Costner finds natural landscapes and lets them overpower his nascent population. There’s nothing staged or hokey nor any obvious studio shoot fakery here. Horizon consistently looks magisterial. Alive. And as for Letterboxd comments that he doesn’t know how to block a scene…. Jesus Christ! The man directed Dance With Wolves and Open Range. There’s a ripplingly filmed horse chase in this that had me tearing at my armrest and later a gundown where Costner is reflected in a trough of water that is so rich with import the one image could be a movie in its own right. It is a beautiful chunk of genre cinema, nearly all the storytelling in the first hour is visual, dialogue-free. Letterboxd user just show their uneducated prejudices when they spout nonsense like this.

So Horizon is blatantly a modernised How The West Was Won. That always is going to set off socio-political alarm bells. There’s no just way, no even handed way, to handle a time period defined by American genocide. Costner confronts the trauma head on. Chapter One begins and ends in brutal massacres. The opening hour is a genuine cinematic wonder but gruelling. We know little of the early pioneers being wiped out. Yet we follow their plight, a night of violence, with an intimate integrity. No punches pulled. No heroes, no villains. Just destructive, desperate humanity. It is like a mosaic of murder, survival and grit. That mode continues as the stars begin to enter the narrative mix. The movie often reminds of Linklater’s Dazed & Confused. No central protagonist but lots of strands travelling towards the same temporal point. Costner, once he starts to let us zero in on specific characters, relationships and potent subplots for the last two hours switches into unpredictable drawn out scenes. Many of the simmering set pieces remind of Tarantino, where the threat is obvious but the dialogue obtuse and unbalancing. A walk up a hill and a stand off in an outpost store both could easily come from a less cartoonish Hateful Eight or Django Unchained’s first draft.

The director most resurrected though is John Ford. With very few embellishments, this is a fine tribute to the great Western director through and through. Michael Rooker does a grand job of aping Victor Mclaglen’s mick cavalry sergeant. Miller makes for a softer Maureen O’Hara type. And Costner himself brings a soulful quiet man spin on a role The Duke would have bulldozer-ed through. His begrudgingly heroic Hayes Ellison is tender and worldly in a way Wayne never was, even at his peak. Three hours of reverential bliss. Action, romance, grandeur. My cup of tea, my shot of whisky. My clanking six shooter and any horse riding to the ravine. Wonderful Dad Cinema. I’m hungry for the next instalment.

8

Perfect Double Bill: Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 (2024)

I write regular features about live comedy for British Comedy Guide here https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/bobby_carroll/features/