THE STORY – “Horizon: An American Saga” chronicles the birth, death and rebirth of a river settlement in nineteenth century New Mexico Territory. Through the entwined and often clashing perspectives of settlers and soldiers, rail magnates and cattle traders, Indigenous Americans and Chinese migrant workers, the film tells a unique, unflinching, ground-level story of a young nation’s struggles, its promise, and its foundational sins.
THE CAST – Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Isabelle Fuhrman, Abby Lee, Will Patton & Ella Hunt
THE TEAM – Kevin Costner (Director/Writer) & Jon Baird (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 190 Minutes
Premiering at the 2024 Venice Film Festival in a late-announced out-of-competition slot, Kevin Costner’s epic western is the second of four planned films, following “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1,” which premiered earlier in the year at the Cannes Film Festival. Unfortunately, while the film improves significantly on the first installment, it still has many of the same problems, making it an ultimately frustrating experience, not least because it now looks like production on the final two chapters has ground to a halt – meaning that audiences may never get to see how it all turns out.
Chapter 2 picks up more or less where Chapter 1 left off, initially splitting the action between the small not-yet-a-town outpost of Horizon, Montana, and the wagon train full of hopefuls heading to Horizon, intending to settle there. Amid a large number of characters (one of the film’s many problems), a few of them stand out, including widowed mother Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her young daughter Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail); former gunslinger Hayes Ellison (Kevin Costner); wagon train leader Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson); patriarch Owen Kittredge (Will Patton); his feisty daughter Diamond (Isabelle Fuhrman); and British settler Juliette (Ella Hunt), who has the chapter’s strongest plot after a terrible fate befalls her husband Hugh (Tom Payne) in an early sequence.
While the hostile Native American tribes were very much the antagonists of the first chapter, Chapter 2 relegates them to the sidelines plot-wise. This allows other villains to take center stage, primarily Sig (Douglas Smith), who has his eyes on Juliette, and Caleb and Junior Sykes (Jamie Campbell Bower and Job Beavers), who have a score to settle with Ellison.
One of the biggest problems with the first film was that it tried to do too much and, in the process, spread itself too thin. Accordingly, it introduced multiple characters without giving them anything remotely interesting to do. Chapter 2 manages a bit of course correction in that respect, as Juliette’s heart-breaking storyline gives her a powerfully emotional character and surprisingly dark character arc, brought to a satisfying conclusion.
The same is true, to a degree, of Costner’s character’s storyline; he had limited screen presence in Chapter 1, but here he gets a bit of backstory and character detail. He also gets two crowd-pleasing action scenes – two more than he got last time. (He still has a terrible haircut, though).
Elsewhere, the storylines are much more frustrating. One might (reasonably so) have expected a developing romance between Sienna Miller’s character and Sam Worthington’s First Lt. Trent Gephardt, given the previous film’s ending, but no. Instead, Worthington gets precisely one scene this time and then promptly disappears for the remainder of the film. He was presumably scheduled to return in Chapter 3 for love triangle purposes, but that won’t happen now.
On a similar note, several characters have so few scenes in this chapter (most notably Abbey Lee’s frontier prostitute, Marigold) that you wonder why they are even in the film. The result is a scattershot approach to the storytelling that backfires to the point where you can’t help feeling that the film could have used a lot of streamlining or at least some judicious shuffling. In addition, though Juliette’s storyline grips this time round, all the scenes with other characters feel flat and lack dramatic incidents. One punch-up and one gunfight in three hours is like short-changing the audience.
At least the performances are largely solid, even if so many of the characters get little to do. Hunt is particularly good, pulling off heart-breaking vulnerability but finding reserves of hidden strength. Fuhrman is excellent as Diamond, the film’s best character; she even rustles up a frisson of chemistry with Hunt’s character. Similarly, Douglas Smith makes an intriguing villain as Sig, not least because of the impact his actions have on the as-yet-unpoliced wagon train group.
On a technical level, the film makes strong use of its picturesque Utah locations, thanks to J. Michael Muro’s cinematography and a rousing score from John Debney that evokes classic Westerns. However, the makeup is a little inconsistent, with Sienna Miller and Georgia MacPhail somehow managing to look fresh as daisies every day despite living in a tent while everyone else looks at varying degrees of dust and dirt.
Finally, one of the most amusing aspects of the previous film was its five-minute “Next time, on Horizon“ ending, with a series of appetite-whetting clips from Chapter 2. This time, the film does the same thing, going straight into the montage of clips without giving Chapter 2 a proper conclusion beforehand. The only difference is that, here, the Chapter 3 clips evoke sadness rather than anticipation because the story is unlikely to be brought to a conclusion.
In retrospect, “Horizon: An American Saga” would’ve been better as a TV miniseries to allow for tighter focus. As it stands, the finished two chapters are a frustrating and disappointing experience, not least because they were starting to come together and heading in a promising direction.
