Kevin Costner trudges ever westward with the methodical Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 2

Six hours into Kevin Costner’s unfussy and digestible Horizon: An American Saga, it does feel like some crucial oversights have been made. Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 2, which Costner shot back-to-back with Chapter 1 for a combined budget of $100 million, around $38M of came from Costner’s coffers, exists in tentpole limbo: Warner Bros. planned to drop Chapter 2 a mere six weeks after Chapter 1, presumably to rake in as much upfront cash as possible in a single summer, before triumphantly greenlighting the scheduled concluding parts of the saga, Chapters 3 and 4.

But after Chapter 1 earned a worldwide total that only matched Costner’s own financial contribution, Chapter 2 was pulled from its August release date and Chapter 1 was dropped on Max. As of writing, Chapter 2 has no confirmed release date, received a demure premiere on the final day of the Venice Film Festival, and, in the lead-up to whatever distribution deal it gets, is unlikely to trigger the greenlighting of 3 and 4. Horizon may have started with admirable ambitions, but it now resembles the wagon trail of Meek’s Cutoff, with Bruce Greenwood leading his dependents into murky uncertainty.

It’s a bummer, not because the straight-laced Horizon has the artistic merit to fix an IP-riddled entertainment climate, but because its promise of a beloved but inconsistent A-lister not compromising on his dream project is endearing; maybe his American Saga is not a cure to a mangled and misguided Hollywood, but it certainly feels like a tonic. But Chapter 2 does not do itself any favors. It was shot and cut long before the rocky roads of the last few months, but there’s no way to watch the 190-minute follow-up without knowing how much is riding on it.

Chapter 2 needs to kick the extended prologue of Chapter 1 into gear. What it does not need to do is patiently walk the next few steps for a select few of our plotlines, deploy no tremendously compelling urgency, or avoid sharp, arresting narrative focus. Chapter 2 delivers the same type of creaky but not uncharming Western melodrama as the first installment, but talks and walks like a film that doesn’t understand what’s at stake.

It’s a bizarre situation: Ideally, there would not be a convoluted and precarious release context to distract from discussing and analyzing the film’s merits. But even if the remaining chapters of Horizon: An American Saga were in the bag, Chapter 2 doesn’t so much build on Chapter 1’s wins and losses as it does replicate them, but now our patience is wearing thin. 

The warm wash of familiar archetypes worn by amiable character actors is still intact, as is the sturdy, restrained craft of Costner’s vision. (Hey, getting six hours of Western for $100 million is pretty cost-effective!) But after an opening hour of the same variation of shot-reverse-shot conversations drip-feeding us minor dramatic impasses in muted voices—like those between homestead widow Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and Irish Sgt. Major Thomas Riordan (Michael Rooker) about the safety of rebuilding their destroyed home, or those mocking conflicted lieutenant Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) for his old-fashioned romantic loyalty—a slightly dulled dread starts to seep in. Will too much of the saga unfold in unflinchingly linear, Quibi-sized increments long before we make it to Horizon, the settler haven imagined by mysterious businessman Mr. Pickering (Giovanni Ribisi)?

When we last left our gunslinging hero, Hayes Ellison (a normal character name for director, co-writer, and star Kevin Costner) had been separated from the sensitive sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee). He’s now working at a ranch providing cavalry reinforcements for the Union army (there’s a war going on, remember!). He tentatively takes a job to rein in the rowdy stablehands and for-hire laborers—less of a sheriff’s gig, more like a Wild West version of Road House‘s cooler.

Changing up Costner’s storyline works well. The power afforded to him by the boss Henry Bennett (Reed Birney) is not something he’s easily comfortable with, and Costner and co-writer Jon Baird deliver some classic Western beats in a neatly condensed form. It’s fun to lap up the unsteady tensions that lead to imbalanced standoffs, and Hayes’ distaste for the ranch’s rusty code of conduct excites our hunger for dubious lawmen facing off against unfeeling capitalism. 

But we only get to enjoy this in segmented chunks, as Costner keeps turning our attention to less immediate or structured strands that swim around their themes instead of lancing them with style and emotion. There are simply too many covert asides between young Elizabeth Kittredge (Georgia MacPhail) and Native American boy Sacaton (Bodhi Okuma Linton) for such little payoff, and a sizeable chunk of time is spent watching Chinese emigres, led by the stubborn Mr. Hong (Jim Lau), build a sawmill trade. (To be honest, this was a fun tangent, hinting at the intended tableau form of Costner’s saga. It can stay.)

Halfway through the film, Chapter 2 picks up, even if it fails to coalesce into something tremendous or convincing. The wagon trail led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) has heaped sorrow upon sorrow onto Juliette Chesney (Ella Hunt), the mannered English wife who learns in an exceedingly cruel fashion just how harsh the West can be to unprepared outsiders. In expanding Hunt’s role from Chapter 1, the Dickinson actress lends her theatrical elocution to a series of grim and affecting glimpses at the transactional reality for vulnerable women in frontier-era America.

Costner’s approach to the possessive and abusive dynamics of patriarchal violence in the West is restrained but not assured, and the compromises that Juliette makes—to her autonomy, to her property—in order to remain safe ought to be felt on a deeper level than the general emotional wash Costner paints to make his sprawling characters fit snugly into his epic. There are plenty of opportunities to address more the complex and murky shades of Costner and Baird’s rigorously routine story. Why make the choice for Laplander immigrants to be the ones doling out physical and sexual abuse? What kind of a guide is Van Weyden if he lets this happen? How does the silence of the other settlers on the trail affect their individualist resolve? The script seems to be content smoothing over the contradictions of frontier hierarchy rather than attacking them.

When some of the film’s disparate groups finally combine, though, like Owen Kittredge (Will Patton) with his hardy daughters (including feisty Diamond, played by Isabelle Fuhrman) reaching his sister-in-law’s under-construction home, you feel a relief tantamount to main characters finally sharing a scene in the latter seasons of Game Of Thrones. In the third hour, Patton, Miller, and Fuhrman emerge as the emotional heart of the story, and you get the sense that the film’s thesis might be about how compromise was key to the building of the West’s mythos.

But this ends only, ostensibly, halfway through this tale, and it has yet to reach the true heft of the story. Following interesting threads is nice, but there does need to be some unifying drive that connects its characters more deeply than everyone venturing towards a clearly-signposted mirage settlement. Burning questions haunt every scene of both Horizon chapters—why can’t this move more urgently, or why can’t it be more compelling in its slowness? The American West was not built in a day, but Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 2 does not convince us to keep our eyes trained on its construction.

Director: Kevin Costner
Writer: Jon Baird, Kevin Costner
Starring: Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Giovanni Ribisi, Jena Malone, Abbey Lee, Michael Rooker, Danny Huston, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Jeff Fahey, Will Patton, Tatanka Means, Owen Crow Shoe, Ella Hunt, Jamie Campbell Bower, Thomas Haden Church
Release Date: September 7, 2024 (Venice)