Kevin Costner’s “Horizon: An American Saga” is a sprawling and fresh take on the classic Western genre. A stellar cast and stunning frontier backdrop underscore a highly compelling plot that weaves together the stories of multiple protagonists as it takes the audience along for a unique look into America’s western origins.
The film, the first installment in what’s meant to be a four part series, sets the scene for an expansive western-themed cinematic universe. Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, the majority of the movie’s characters are manifest destiny-type travelers heading west to seek a better life in the frontier.
While the scope of the film, as a consequence of the wide swath of characters’ stories it covers, is broad, it still manages to set a tone that focuses more on the struggles of everyday travelers from this time period rather than forcing a historical or political narrative.
A still shot of Kevin Costner’s character Hayes Ellison in the new Costner-directed “Horizon: An American Saga.” Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema.
“Our research tended to focus on lesser-known figures, and on their firsthand, contemporary accounts of the era and its challenges,” the film’s scriptwriter Jon Baird wrote in a document shared with the Daily Caller.
“These people might, years later, on looking back and squinting, make out the contours of western migration and the closing of the frontier, of the Civil and Apache Wars and so on. But in their letters and diaries we find a much more earthbound and practical – if no less profound – portrait of early American life,” Baird continued.
A consistent thematic throughline of the movie is the town of Horizon, an idyllic-seeming settlement advertised on flyers which every character in the movie seems to be running towards.
“We travel and struggle with these people. We see the good and the evil they do, and cheat death and displacement and boredom with them. And where these individual stories overlap, we find, over time, that a collective history—the portrait of a town, and of a difficult era in the nation’s birth—has taken shape,” Baird continues.
Shot amidst the stunning vistas of Zion National Park in Utah, the cinematic specter of mountains, deserts, blue skies and wide open spaces, it’s extremely visually compelling and the cinematography takes you back to what seemed like an exhilarating time in our nation’s history.
“The landscape is just so dramatic, so beautiful and so big. It goes on and on. The beauty is in the rawness,” Costner said. “Where a developer sees thousands of houses, I see open space that represents the Garden of Eden that we lost,” he continued.
While many classic westerns tell the story of settlers vs. natives, Horizon tells an old story in a fresh and exciting way. The film features a brutal and harrowing indigenous raid on an American settlement complete with scalping, homes burning and all the gory brutality (tastefully, of course) that western fans are used to seeing. (RELATED: Kevin Costner Reflects On What Fuels His Success After Decades In The Spotlight)
But it also explores the political dynamics within the film’s main native tribe, the White Mountain Apache, and exhibits the internal debates over going to war with the white man.
“It’s told mostly from the point of view of the settlers coming, but when we introduce the Native Americans, it was really important to me to give them the dignity, the ferociousness that they had, because they were fighting for their way of life, their religion, their existence,” Costner noted.
The storyline is really multiple stories, interfolded into what promises to be a continually sprawling saga. Aside from Costner’s character Hayes Ellison, who he brings to life masterfully, there are marquee performances from veteran actors like Sam Worthington, Luke Wilson, Michael Rooker and Siena Miller.
A still shot of Siena Miller’s character in the new Kevin Costner-directed “Horizon: An American Saga.” Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema.
A still shot of Luke Wilson’s character in the new Kevin Costner-directed “Horizon: An American Saga.” Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema.
A still shot of Sam Worthington’s character in the new Kevin Costner-directed “Horizon: An American Saga.” Photo courtesy of New Line Cinema.
One small but notable role I found to be particularly compelling was that of Junior Sykes, the younger brother of the Sykes family who play a rough and tumble antagonistic brood to Costner’s character. Sykes is played by Jamie Campbell Bower.
Overall, the three-hour feature tells a compelling and original series of stories in a genre that’s been largely done to death. It also sets the stage for the three future installments, giving each of the arguable protagonists (I counted seven) potential to have their own fleshed out stories.
The film releases nationwide in theaters June 28.
