HORIZON: A Critical Saga of American Criticism, Chapter 1

The first chapter of Kevin Costner's HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA, which opened yesterday, has taken a real critical drubbing, but having watched it last night, I would suggest that anyone who happens across its 39% "fresh" score on critical aggregator Rotten Tomatoes--only 21% "fresh" among "top critics"--and gets the impression that it's the celluloid stink-bomb of historical proportions that implies and is thus dissuaded from seeing it will have become the victim of a crime against cinema.

To be fair to its critics, it must be acknowledged that the nature of HORIZON 1 just makes it difficult to review. It's only the first entry in a tetralogy. It isn't a finished franchise film with a beginning, middle, end and 3 planned sequels--it's basically just one-quarter of one big movie. We aren't going to be able to properly judge it until it has finished playing out. But someone who is paid to review movies can't wait until the last chapter hits the screens; they have to write about what they've seen.

What they've seen so far runs for 3 hours and is mostly just set-up. Aiming straight for a Sprawling Epic, HORIZON 1 is jam-packed with characters and plotlines, which are still being introduced virtually right to its end. The meat of the tale, when all of these elements begin to interact, will take place in the subsequent installments.[1]

This quarter-movie's professional appraisers know all of this. They've just often chosen to evaluate the project as if they didn't. While many of the specific criticisms they've dished out could eventually prove spot-on, they can't really be justified based on what we've gotten so far. Given the context, what's the point, for example, in complaining about the lack of "closure" for characters' arcs? Why accuse the quarter-movie of a lack of "focus"? When so much of the movie is setting up what's to come, is it really a justifiable rebuke to say the plot "barely inched forward"? Calling Costner "overindulgent" implies the film is padded with needlessly extraneous material that a more disciplined director would have reigned in and cut down, but again, that's something we can't judge until HORIZON's final chapter has played out. It feels like a lot of this is just complaining for the sake of complaining.

How is HORIZON 1 though?

Going into it, I was definitely on its side. I love a good Western. After nearly dying for a few decades, the genre has staged a notable comeback in recent years and an A-Western that was both good and successful could only fertilize the revival. I'm a fan of a lot of Costner's work, and my heart is always with these sorts of passion-projects (Costner has worked for decades to bring this to the screen and reportedly put a fortune of his own money into it). I was hoping it would be good.

I wasn't disappointed. The movie has a huge cast packed with top-shelf talent who offer up some great, sincere performances. It has a grand scale, done well (for those like myself who can appreciate that) and often beautiful, sweeping cinematography to match. The score sometimes feels old fashioned--Hollywood Epic Orchestral Score--but sometimes even that's good-old-days old-fashioned. There are some really good moments. A walk-and-talk by Costner and Jamie Campbell Bower, here doing a heel-turn, is a particularly great sequence. At the low end of the critical bell-curve, the flick has drawn adjectives like "dull" or "ponderous," but my usual dismissive grumbles about people without an attention span don't really apply here; HORIZON 1 moves at a steady clip (at 3 hours, it felt more like 2), there's plenty of action, always something going on and it's usually interesting. It's not a slow movie, and one wonders if those tagging it with the complaints that a more deliberately-paced flick may, to the ADD-afflicted, seem to earn are just randomly reaching into the cliche-bag with bad-faith fingers for any negative descriptor one could throw at any 3-hour movie.

Here's a cliche that applies: It isn't perfect. When I left the theater, I was pondering what appear to be some strange editing choices. At one point, Costner's character Ellison and Abbey Lee's Marigold are being hunted by a DARK VALLEY-style villain and pause on a hill over a settlement in order to allow their pursuers to ask around among the locals, satisfy themselves that their quarry haven't passed through and continue on. Ellison says that, in the morning, he'll go down and see about purchasing a tent, so they won't have to sleep on the ground in their ongoing flight. But when the movie returns to them, they've taken up residence, Ellison has a job, Mari has a beau (or at least trick) and it seems as if some time has passed. It was an odd place to put such a jump and it felt like there was something missing. At another point, Jenna Malone's character Lucy, who is one of the first recurring characters the film introduces, has been captured by those same villains, who have been looking for her and her child for years with orders to bring them back to that DARK VALLEY patriarch, but when they return to said patriarch, she's nowhere in sight. Unless she was killed and I just missed the mention of it--which is, admittedly, possible--that felt like another weird gap. Shooting the film in a 1:85 aspect ratio is a head-scratcher--if any project ever begged for scope cinematography, this is it. The decision to run the end-titles over a rendition of "Amazing Grace" was really bad (because, well, it always is).

Still, those are relatively minor faults--if they prove to be faults at all--and the impression of a GIANT CLAW-sized turkey left by Rotten Tomatoes is very unfair. My initial impression is that this was a good start. It has me looking forward to the next installment and, as it's set to arrive in August, I won't even have to wait very long.

--j.

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[1] That so much of it was just set-up probably accounts for the somewhat questionable release schedule. Rather than releasing the first part then waiting, say, a year, the 2nd installment is coming out next month. Because viewers will likely be required to see every installment in order to make heads or tails out of it, this sort of limits the next HORIZON to a portion of the first's initial audience, whereas a longer gap would allow those who missed it to catch up on it via streaming or, for those of us who still engage in that arcane practice, home video. Perhaps it was thought that a set-up picture with a longer wait was a bigger risk.