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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 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 criminal 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 Uta.

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