... not the greatest movie in the world. Concept's fine, though, but not the execution.
This is Kevin Costner's first film as director since 2003's Open Range. An epic saga of development hell turned what was initially a single film into four, with Chapter Two coming out next month and Chapter Three already filming. At least, that was the plan, until Chapter Two was yanked off the schedule yesterday. Let's see what went wrong.
The film chronicles several different storylines in the Old West. The Lionshare of the story is centered around the San Pedro Valley in the settlement of Horizon. It's a place advertised as the ultimate destination for the settlers of the American Frontier. It's also in Apache territory, and the warrior Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) is determined to drive the settlers away. He and his warriors start the film by killing the surveyors setting up Horizon by a river. The actual settlers build Horizon on the opposite side of said river. Pionsenay burns the town to the ground in a nighttime raid. A few settlers survive, including young Russell (Etienne Kellici), who brings with him a Union regiment to protect the survivors.
Meanwhile, in Montana, a frontierswoman named Lucy (Jenna Malone) shoots her ex-lover James Sykes and takes their baby with her. James's sons, Junior & Caleb (Jon Beavers & Jamie Campbell Bower), are dispatched to apprehend her. Lucy soon makes the acquaintance of prostitute Marigold (Abbey Lee) and horse trader Hayes Ellison (Costner), who help raise the baby with her. Also meanwhile, over on the Santa Fe Trail, Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) leads a wagon train to Horizon (remember, news travelled slow those days). That's pretty much it for that storyline. But there's a bunch of other story threads I'll discuss later on.
All of these storylines are jumbled around in its massive 181-minute timeframe. We get a massive cast of characters to keep track of; plenty of them are either too meh to care about or too dead before we get that chance. The guy who I least liked was some random dude at Horizon with an appallingly poor sense of gun safety. But I felt nothing when he got arrowed in the raid. Frances Kitteridge (Sienna Miller) survived the raid with her daughter, Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail), but her husband and son (who don't) are forgotten about pretty quickly. A few scenes are dragged way out: it's more repetitive than tense when Caleb Sykes threatens Lucy and her husband Walter (Michael Angarano). Its attempts at humor are so jarring they seem to belong in another movie.
Did any of the story lines work? I think Costner and his co-writers, Jon Baird and Michael Kasdan, had a strong focus right with the Horizon plotline. That's where we get the most compelling character: Russell. For starters, it takes a lot of guts to outride the raiders in the night. He later joins Elias Janney's (Scott Haze) posse to get revenge on the Apache raiders. But while the posse decides to slaughter random Natives, not caring if they were Apache or even affiliated with Pionsenay, Russell can't bring himself to shoot a random man when the posse eggs him on. Him breaking the cycle of vengeance might form a good contrast with Pionsenay, though who knows now when, or if, we'll get to see that play out.
I wasn't moved that much, but I still have to respect John Debney's score here. It's got a good melancholic main theme and some perfectly intense music for the action scenes. There's some decent period makeup and hairstyling work on the cast. There's some good production design for the Frontier cities, particularly for pre and post raid Horizon, but it's J. Michael Muro's cinematography that really sells it as a big screen experience. The landscapes on display look perfect even if the story isn't.
The film's biggest problem is that it neglects itself for future installments. Its underdeveloped and numerous plotlines are clearly meant to make sense in one of the later sequels (or, in the case of the wagon train, saved for next time). But something's amiss when the groundwork for these plotlines is shaky. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 ends on a montage of scenes from the next movie. I hope for Costner's sake that everything established here makes sense whenever we get to see it. But I can't imagine how this could be a tetralogy. A trilogy, maybe? But that's it for now.
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