[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

KEVIN COSTNER’S HORIZON IS AS BAD AS YOU’VE HEARD  
[[link removed]]


 

Eileen Jones
July 8, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Supposedly the first of four films, Kevin Costner’s dull and
messy Western throwback, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, is
almost certainly dead on arrival. _

The bloated and bloviating three-hour epic is only the first of four
Horizon movies that Kevin Costner plans to foist upon us., (New Line
Cinema)

 

I finally went to see Kevin Costner’s flop
[[link removed]] Western, _Horizon:
An American Saga – Chapter 1_. Not because I wanted to
see _Horizon_ — at this point, does anybody? — but because
morbid curiosity drove me on. If you read enough annihilating reviews
and gleefully slagging commentary, sometimes the burning question
becomes, “How abysmal is it, really?”

_Horizon_ is the kind of movie that makes you contemplate with awe
the people who read the script and claimed to like it; who acted in it
thinking they were going to come across well, without realizing,
“Here is where I earn my Razzie nomination”; who watched the final
cut of this barely formed slurry of a film and said, “Yeah, this
movie is ready to show to a paying public.”

But the most jaw-dropping aspect of the whole experience is learning
that this bloated and bloviating three-hour epic is only the first of
four _Horizon_ movies that Costner is planning to foist upon us.
He’ll never do it! Surely we’ll unite as a society, despite our
differences, to prevent this outrage!

Writer Stephen King might claim
[[link removed]] we
should be grateful for any original media in an IP world of sequels,
reboots, and exhausted franchises, but I say we still have a right to
call a turd a turd.

Anyway,_ Horizon_ interweaves many stories about settlers surging
westward in a massive land grab partly catalyzed by handbills touting
the glories of fantasy communities like Horizon. And if I had to watch
one more shot of a character gaze longingly at that damn handbill, I
was about to torch the theater.

These settlers encounter increasingly violent resistance from the
indigenous peoples living on the land. In the actual drab and remote
Arizona settlement called Horizon, there are just enough people to
raise an old-time, fiddle-playing, foot-stomping dance at a roughhewn,
newly raised building, as celebrated in John Ford’s Westerns, before
an Apache raid decimates the place. The cavalry officer Lt Trent
Gephardt (Sam Worthington) tells the survivors they have to move to a
more populated area where the US Army can offer some reliable
protection, or else take their chances.

Costner, cowriting with Jon Baird, has set up several other storylines
ranging from the Southwest to the northwestern states like Wyoming and
Montana. One involves a wagon train of pioneers led by cranky trail
boss Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson). And then there’s a taciturn
prospector named Hayes Ellison (Costner), who arrives at a muddy
degenerate hamlet and gets involved with a flirtatious prostitute
named Marigold (Abbey Lee). She’s minding a small boy for another
sex worker named Lucy “Ellen” Harvey (Jena Malone), who’s run
afoul of one of those feral, fur-wearing barbarian clans who always
represent the downside of frontier liberty in classic Westerns
like _My Darling Clementine_ (1946) and _The Big Country_ (1958).
Soon Ellison, Marigold, and the boy are on the run through rugged
territory, pursued by gunslinging degenerates in wolf hides.

There are some indigenous characters identified as White Mountain
Apache members, led by the peaceable Tuaheseh (Gregory Cruz) facing
off against his militant son, Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), who headed
up the massacre at Horizon. They have a big scene arguing two sides of
the widening tribal schism. It’s that familiar plotline that’s
been done in several old Westerns like _Broken Arrow_ (1950), _The
Battle at Apache Pass _(1952), _Conquest of Cochise_ (1953),
and _Apache_ (1954), though it generally involves two chiefs,
Geronimo vs. Cochise, arguing about the decision to either engage in
an all-out war against whites or adopt a conciliatory approach based
on the hopelessness of stopping the tide of settlers.

And as in Costner’s _Dances with Wolves_ (1990), there’s a
troubled cavalry officer who concerns himself with the Native
Americans being violently displaced by whites. When, in _Horizon_, Lt
Gephardt asks about “indigenous” concerns, as if that were an
ordinary term of discourse in the US Army of the time, it’s an
awkwardly ahistorical moment that stops the whole lumbering movie in a
moment of acute embarrassment.

These gestures give Costner plausible deniability about his
old-fashioned triumphalist Western, indicating he’s being more
sensitive to the fraught history of the West in terms of the Native
American experience. His narrative features two massacres, for example
— the Apaches who wipe out the Horizon settlement and the revenge
massacre led by white survivors. The revenge massacre shows
understandably anguished survivors being persuaded toward greater evil
when they can’t locate the tribe they’re after, so they settle on
a random tribe to attack, but only once the warriors leave and it’s
just women and children left in the camp. And the taking of scalps
from the corpses, which pay a generous bounty, becomes one of the main
motivating factors.

But even with all these gestures taken together, Costner’s supposed
evenhandedness just doesn’t hold water. He wants to have it all
ways, and it can’t be done. Critic Armond White, writing for the
conservative _National Review_, sneers
[[link removed]] that
the film represents Costner’s shaky RINO political stance, with
“the skepticism about America’s founding combined with the
optimism that made both _Dances with Wolves_ and his ecological
Third World fantasy _Rapa Nui_ into fatuous hippie visions of global
conquest.”

It’s incredible how stupidly celebratory of the Western
genre _Horizon_’s whole elegiac shooting style is. There’s so
much worshipful footage of white men standing tall among mesas and
raising guns symbolic of conquest against sunset horizons and riding
fast horses against Apaches. Like Jerry Seinfeld, Costner clearly
likes a world-dominating “real man
[[link removed]].”

If you enjoy aspects of old Westerns, in spite of their generally
nightmarish Manifest Destiny ideology, you’ll recognize amid
Costner’s nervous and unconvincing feints just how much he owes to
traditionalist Western filmmaker John Ford. Ford’s later questioning
of his own beliefs, instigated by the civil rights movement, found its
way into his later, darker, more troubling film-noir-ish Westerns, and
no doubt Costner thinks he’s treading the same fraught, disturbing
territory. But somehow the disturbance doesn’t come across. Neither
does Ford’s excellent handling of bold narrative, his exciting,
inventive action, or his generally riveting cinematography and
editing. Those qualities writer-director-producer-star Kevin Costner
cannot seem to get a handle on.

Even Ford at his most excessively old-fashioned and sentimental would
be shocked by how far Costner takes certain Ford tendencies, like
demonstrating how rough frontier men worship delicate ladies as the
pinnacle of civilization, while lower-class women and women of color
who are sex workers or serve drinks in saloons are insulted, kicked
around for laughs, and thrown into horse troughs. Of the white
survivors of the Apache massacre at Horizon in Costner’s film, for
example, there’s a refined blonde woman named Frances Kittredge
(Sienna Miller) and her even blonder teenage daughter Lizzie (Georgia
MacPhail), and they’re treated with slack-jawed, pop-eyed reverence
by all the men in the cavalry.

Costner’s _Horizon_ is a slack, boring, sickening mess of a film,
every bit as bad as you’ve heard, and even more moronically
regressive than you might’ve imagined. But at least there’s no
need for you to see it, since all the reviews and commentary by the
honestly repulsed are representing it accurately. Stay away, so that
even if a _Horizon – Chapter 2_ is destined to pollute our
screens, we might at least avoid the fate of chapters three and four.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE

Facebook  Twitter  Email

CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.

* SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]]
* DONATE [[link removed]]

To celebrate Bastille Day, new print and digital subscriptions are
just $7.89 [[link removed]]

* horizon
[[link removed]]
* kevin Costner
[[link removed]]
* the American west
[[link removed]]
* western expansion
[[link removed]]
* westerns
[[link removed]]
* manifest destiny
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]