As a film critic, I don’t care what the movie cost. I don’t care how much of it came out of Kevin Costner’s pocket. I don’t care about the sequel or about any additional chapters for the film. I don’t care about his on-or-off relationship with Yellowstone.
So, that is going to be 65% of the content most of the reviews you might read of this film. Moving on…
The core problem of the film is that it has set itself up not to stand alone as a film.
It’s all well and good that we, as an audience, can feel that all the varied pieces will eventually come together. But the idea of commercial movies is that those pieces will come together in a 3-hour movie, not just hint at it.
At first, Costner and his co-writers Jon Baird and Mark Kasdan suggest that we might be watching an old west take on There Will Be Blood, lingering on the most basic steps that will eventually lead to the town of Horizon. It’s slow. But it’s interesting enough. Watching them work are a couple young natives, followed by adult men. What will happen?
Nothing all that valuable.
The film doesn’t build the foundations of the story and express a fundamental conflict that will define the movie and eventually, the entire saga. Instead, it flips to another story. And then another story. And another. And a fifth, as I recall.
If you are there to see Kevin Costner, you can expand the new habit that people seem to have of showing up 20 minutes or longer after the movie start time and wait until about 90 minutes after the theater start time… cause he is not in the movie for the first hour.
This left me wondering whether this is the Kevin Costner movie they have been selling or is the the ensemble that Costner & Co clearly intend it to be. (Costner’s Silverado character, who is a highlight of the movie, but not lead, turns up 23 minutes into the film.)
There are some beautiful moments of filmmaking along the way. The landscape is, obviously, glorious. There are a lot of good actors in the movie, though sometimes it feels like a parade of Costner’s favorite characters actors (mine too!) who are there for a moment or two, dressed in some get-up, but don’t really have much to do. (Will Patton, Michael Rooker, Tim Guinee, Michael Angarano, and James Russo for starters.) When Jeff Fahey shows up in a grown-out version of his Ike Clanton look from 1993’s Wyatt Earp, I laughed out loud. Nothing against Fahey or his performance… there was just a lot of that. I am a fan of Angus Macfadyen and he is in the cast list and I never recall seeing him.
There are a lot of great actors who get some meaty work to do as well. So don’t get me wrong. But in a 3-hour movie that doesn’t have a clear driving story, these elements become distractions.
I gather, after reading on it, that the movie is set near or within the years of the Civil War taking place in the east. Honestly, I wasn’t worried about those politics during this film. What is the film saying about slavery and equality and what is it not was not my issue. Slavery is as important an issue to America as exists… but this movie didn’t have to dip into that for me to be a happy viewer. That would be a next level problem for me (a level like is this a really good movie or a great one?).
I needed to know what this movie thinks about the natives who were being displaced. Are they good guys? Are they bad guys? Are they in the gray, sliding between right and wrong under extreme circumstances and constant duress? There are versions of all of those answers in the film. But I can’t say that the film is about any kind of moral ambiguity in the resettling of the west.
Within the white culture of this movie, there is a bit more clarity… classic movie clarity. Everyone is at risk. Everyone is being brave on some level. But there are the good men and the bad men and you can tell the difference almost instantly in sequence after sequence. There are also some assholes who float somewhere in the middle.
Then there are the women… another element where Costner seems all over the place. Sienna Miller seems to be the lead woman… even more defined in that role than the male lead. But what is she as a creation? She is aggressively objectified at some points. She is a singularly relentless and clever survivor at others. Is she is a practical woman looking out for her future or is she a little desperate to have a man in her bed? Is she headed to Sam Worthington or Costner or both?
All the other women in the film seem defined by their genital status more than being allowed full characters. Jena Malone has a good juicy role as a tough, smart person… but it turns out that she used to turn tricks. Ella Hunt is interesting a seemingly high-born Brit, who is then peeped upon while bathing where she could easily be seen by 2 idiots… but also by Costner’s camera, which lingers long enough in enough shots to eventually show her naked body to the audience… from a distance, but with undeniable intention. So are those idiots the perverts or are we? Abbey Lee plays a feisty hooker. Dale Dickey, who I love watching, is the all-too-expected mother of the Sykes gang here. And the Chapter One-virginal Georgia MacPhail spends her time floating around like unconscious horny-cowboy bait.
Here is where I go off-track a bit from specifics of the movie…
I disagree with assertions that the film is really a TV series in movie clothes. You would never structure a tv series like this. Ever. It is asking too much of the audience. This chapter alone is 3 hours. A TV series that doesn’t tell you what its intentions are in the first 3 episodes - not finding strengths and weaknesses… telling the audience why they are watching - is a show that will have lost its viewership in those 3 hours.
What this experience did remind me of, however, is the combination of Yellowstone and 1883 and 1923 if they were all made as one TV series… with a couple more spin-offs (1953 and 1983?) added and set in the same period.
Thing is… Kevin… you daring, genius 40-year-true-movie-star egomaniac… the first movie of any series of movies needs to be able to stand alone. Sorry, but you are no above this basic law of movie physics.
You could have picked 3 stories to tell and then added another pair in the next film.
You could have made a movie where the intricate clarity of the first sequence of this film becomes a more complex, but similarly intricate sequence about who the next group was that came, what they had in mind, and then also had their efforts destroyed. And THEN started moving the next group (the core of your 4some of films) across country, facing all the challenges of coming west, with a third idea of how they were going to tame that plot land and avoid the fate of their predecessors… have them start in the third act and have the cliffhanger for the next film that the danger is coming.
You set up so many stories, all taking place at essentially the same time, that instead of feeling the driving movement towards a shared story, the audience either needs to get out an Excel spreadsheet to keep all the players organized or they have to give up and just watch the pretty pictures and enjoy the nicely directed sequences… which is what most of the positive reviews I have read chose as their way of engaging.
There is one TV series that this reminds me of, actually. Game of Thrones. I remember when HBO sent out the first discs of the first season along with a massive chart, explaining all the families and how they fit together. It was laughable. Who the hell was going to figure all this out? And yes, the series was confusing early on. But it was actually a bit more restrained in mixing it all together in the first 3 hours of Horizon. The first hour had 2 A-stories - the Starks and the Baratheons - and side stories, like Daenerys Targaryon being married/sold off to the Dothraki warlord and the incest between Cersei and Jamie. The audience is left to figure out for themselves what the A and B stories are in Horizon.
The ambition of Horizon is something I honor deeply. Not many would try it and anyone pushing the format of theatrical movie-going has a fan in me.
But another challenging epic like Dune, which is 26 minutes shorter, is massive and showy and aggressively slow at times… but is still feels much clearer than Horizon. There is the good guy family and the evil family and the powers behind both. There is the treachery of the land itself… and then, the people who inhabit that land and are not willing to let it be sucked dry by the evil family. Of course, I am simplifying a bit, and the pieces of Horizon are not as murky or complex as Dune, they feel unfocused. With Dune, you have more of a sense of where it is all going.
Many of the great westerns (including Silverado) involve a gathering of disparate parties to achieve a goal. But the teams tend to come together within an hour. After 3 hours of Horizon, you are still waiting for even the idea of how this puzzle is going to fit together. I mean… hell… one of what seems to be one of the main characters/villains of the films by credit placement isn’t even in this movie.
Now I feel like I am repeating myself.
I wanted to love this movie. I was ready for the fight. I was ready to argue that the complainers were movie heathens who just weren’t willing to embrace the ambition of the film.
But I can’t. The movie is not bad. It just chooses not to fulfill the viewer… over 3 hours. It has its moments. It may become a great 12 hours of movie love. But the ends will never justify the means. This is not revolutionary material. It’s not an art film. It’s not The Zone of Silence Goes West. And a 3-hour movie is not a serial.
It could be - and we have no real way of knowing at this point - that there are 2 great 3 hour westerns in the first 6 hours of Horizon. It might be that there are 2 great 2-hour movies in the 6 hours. It might be that there are 3 great 2.5-hour movies in the 9 hours or 12 hours. Don’t know.
But what this is now is a mistake. Not an embarrassment. Not a terrible movie. But a passionate idea that lost perspective on itself.
Leave the audience wanting more… not needing more so they can figure out what the hell the movie they just paid for and watched for 3 hours is meant to be.
I would be so much happier if it worked.
Until tomorrow…
De