There's a scene deep into Kevin Costner's new Western when he and a woman are fleeing bad guys on horseback. They pause at a jaw-dropping vista and he turns to her: "You just gotta keep going," he tells her. That should be the slogan of "Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1," the initial three-hour salvo in what could morph into a four-part epic about the West that could tax even the biggest cowboy fan.
Give Costner — co-writer, director producer — his due. This is a labor of love he's been thinking about since the 1980s and he has skin in the game: He took out a mortgage on his 10-acre home in Santa Barbara, California Well, one of his homes, at least. He's not a total idiot.
"Chapter 1" — "Chapter 2" is to be released in August and parts three and four depend on if folks keep going — is a sprawling, often unwieldy placesetter, introducing dozens of characters in different parts of the West who, one has to assume, will interact at some point. If they survive, that is. It's a spectacularly unsubtle movie from the opening moment when a group of ants on a hill of dirt are crushed by a surveyor's wooden stake If there's any doubt what we must feel listen to John Debney's ponderous pretentious score, with its crimina overuse of cellos.
Costner scrambles the plot — crafted by him and Jon Baird — almost immediately by offering a climactic battle scene within the first half hour one in which a small white settlement in Arizona's San Pedro Valley (thanks, southern Utah.
