Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 ★★1⁄2 (M) 181 minutes If you want to make an epic Western at present, the easy way is to relocate the frontier to a post-apocalyptic future, or to outer space. Otherwise, there’s always TV. But evidently none of those options were good enough for Kevin Costner in this partly self-funded project, his first film as director since Open Range in 2003.
Kevin Costner in a scene from Horizon. Credit: AP Sitting through the three-hour Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 , I assumed I was seeing the first half of an envisaged whole, akin to an old-fashioned mini-series spread over two nights. In fact, there are four films planned, meaning that Costner is operating more on the scale of James Cameron’s Avatar saga – itself a Western by other means, starring Sam Worthington as a US soldier “gone native” among blue-skinned aliens, a scenario which owed something to Costner’s long-ago Oscar triumph Dances With Wolves .
Coincidentally or not, Worthington shows up again in Horizon , as a US Army lieutenant showing cautious sympathy for the “local indigenous”. Cameron, however, has been careful to ensure that his two Avatar movies so far can each be enjoyed as stand-alone spectacles – and, still more vitally that the audience knows from early on what the story is all about. This first chapter of Horizon , by contrast, has no single story or theme: we seem to be watching a number of different Westerns arbitrarily pasted togeth.