- Starring
- Keving Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington
- Director
- Kevin Costner
- Rating
- R
- Genre
- Drama, Western
- Release date
- June 28, 2024
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
Although their popularity waned in the latter part of the 20th century, Westerns have been a staple of American cinema since the early 1900s, with early silent films like “The Great Train Robbery” (1903) laying the groundwork for the genre. No stranger to this distinctly American niche, especially after his role as the harsh and unforgiving Dutton patriarch in Yellowstone, Kevin Costner tries to continue the tradition of the Great American Western with Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1.
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is set in the 1860s during the Civil War. It follows various Western archetypes who journey to the American West to build new lives and find their fortune. However, the Apache tribe, already there, is unhappy about the settlers encroaching on their land. The movie introduces characters and locations that will no doubt be key to the four planned movies, exploring generations of settlers and Indigenous people struggling to survive in the American West.
Horizon: An American Saga Review
Horizon is filled with sweeping shots of the ever-stunning American West. Its vistas, both beautiful and harsh, serve as the film’s unsung hero because, short of that and the obvious care and thought that went into the set construction and costuming, there isn’t much else good to say about the film.
For even as beautiful as the scenery may be, the cinematography is a stylistic neuter. Meant to be a generationally spanning epic, scenes are framed like a movie of the week, with unnecessary close-ups and a multitude of quick cuts when panoramic wide shots and lingering single shots would have better told the story and given the film its intended scope.
Arguably, Horizon’s greatest weakness is its lack of cohesion. Instead of a contiguous narrative with subplots that build and support its central narrative, Horizon is a fractured series of disjointed vignettes with little time spent on developing their characters or individual elements. Its bizarre structure makes it virtually impossible to bond with characters or events and robs the story of all momentum and the audience of any sense of the passage of time. In one scene, a woman’s family is murdered, and in another, days, months, or years later (who can tell?), she’s falling in love with another man. In another, a young girl introduced in an earlier tragic scene is now in love with a random soldier who is going to war, and the film expects us to care… because.
Combined with an incredibly generic “Western” score and performances that are a grabbag of amateurish and barely passable (often thanks to some very unnatural dialogue), not to mention pacing that wished it could reach turtle speeds, Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 never peaks in quality beyond that of a middling TV mini-series.
WOKE ELEMENTS
What Make The Red Man Red
- Every group of Indian-hating white men has one among them whose sole purpose is to remind them and the audience that not all tribes are the same.
- Sam Worthington’s character continually and clunkily refers to the Indians as “Indigenous.”
James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
7 comments
Aloysius T. McKeever
July 9, 2024 at 8:35 pm
Yikes!!!
Omen Bird
July 10, 2024 at 5:40 am
Ok, the only thing I agree with this review is that the romance elements are done in a juvenile fashion, as per Hollywood/post-sexual revolution standards.
Otherwise I thought all the acting and cinematography was great. I wasn’t bothered by the disconnected stories because I knew going in that the movie would be abnormal in this regard, and it would be a slow setup for the continuation. Going to the theater to enjoy 3 hours of high quality western was a joy. And I didn’t find the movie slow at all, the multiple storylines kept the pace and intrigue up all the time.
If you love westerns I really recommend going to the theater to watch it. 3 hours of western bliss!
Josh777
July 14, 2024 at 11:43 pm
ONE OF THE WORST MOVIES I’VE EVERY SEEN!!!
kerl
July 18, 2024 at 1:50 pm
A black man, before the civil war, appear as a free colonizer in the first 15 minutes of the movie and he’s conforting a whithe dude. If it’s supposed to be a movie with historical accuracy, what could be more woke than that ? White folks tough they were supperior to black folks back then, even after after the abolition of slavery it was still a thing… I stopped after that.
You place a story in a specific point in history, you respect how people acted at this point toward each other.
Sweet Deals
July 18, 2024 at 7:06 pm
American history isn’t quite as clear-cut as that.
Unlike those ridiculous European dramas that black-wash ancient Celtics, Viking warriors and members of the royal family, there were many free black persons living in America in the 19th century. Many of them did go out west. And I’m guessing that if you’re a pioneer or a cowboy carving a civilization out from the wilderness, the color of your neighbor’s skin is likely not as important as whether or not he is an honest person you can count on when trouble strikes.
Granted, wokeness has been so thoroughly ingrained in the pop cultural consciousness for so many years now that even I have trouble telling the difference between an ordinary black character and a Boring Brown Person, even when I want to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Ktuff_morning
July 21, 2024 at 9:33 pm
You completely missed a glaring chunk of woke; the black dude at the beginning. He patronizes a white male to an obnoxious extent. He takes charge of the white men in defense of the cabin while not being any kind of established leader or authority figure. Not very pre-civil war is it? A black man from that era would have lowered his eyes and taken his hat off and apologized for daring to contradict a white man in public. A glaring incongruity.
But we know perfectly well what’s going on: it’s a virtue-signaling lick-ass to the Academy to “compensate” for having a strong white male star.
Let’s have a frank and earnest discussion about black people in the movies. Are we not yet beyond giving the benefit of the doubt for exactly why black folk are cast 99% of the time? I mean there was an explicit mandate by the Academy to include multiple black characters or the movie won’t be considered for Oscar contention. To quote Richard Dreyfuss “it makes me sick”. What an affront to artistic license. Artists are FORCED to use actors based on the color of their skin. Virtue-signaling run amok indeed.
I actually want to see a craven beaten down black man apologize to a white man in public. I want to see him take orders from a cracker. Why? In order to compensate for all the explicit anti-white male bias we’ve had to endure over the years. It’s time for some reverse-reverse discrimination to compensate for the over-engineered social morality is what I say.
Hey, the Academy didn’t specify all the black characters have to be gods and the white males their sinveling lickspittle did they?
The movie was good. It was so disjointed I couldn’t follow it but then I was like oh screw it and I just sat and watched “stuff happen”. Worked for me.
Ktuff_morning
July 30, 2024 at 10:34 am
I think the disjointed fashion of the movie was deliberate, foreshadowed by the scurrying ants in the first shot, portraying the disorderly chaos of settlers in the new frontier. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a contrast in part 2 with more organized editing and resolved plotlines.