The blessing and curse of Kevin Costner’s first chapter in his “American Saga,” , is that there’s no visible horizon (yet). It opens with a surveyor marking out the boundaries for a new home with his son, making it an apt metaphor for experiencing the three hours that follow. is about laying the groundwork for an ongoing project.
It is not complete within itself. You’re much more likely to enjoy if you know that in advance. That way, you can appreciate how Costner is staking out the themes and ideas to come.
Spanning the San Pedro, Montana, and Wyoming territories, with the Civil War brewing in the background, introduces us to a handful of characters who have already been scattered to the wind by war, fortune, necessity, and occupation. The land is littered with the blood and bodies of the old and young. This is not a naïve Western that believes in an innate purity or submissiveness of the land.
Costner understands that the West that Americans hear about in stories and see in classic Westerns like are built on bloodshed. begins with the land being a hotly contested space since the arrival of white colonizers. After an Apache raid on the first Horizon settlement, Francis Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her surviving daughter Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail) come under the care of the Union Army, including a delightful Michael Rooker as Sgt.
Major Riordan, led by First Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington, king of unending franchises and wearing blue amongst the natives). .
