Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2 is the latest installment in writer-director-star Kevin Costner’s planned four-part film series, which opened in the U.S. this past July to many poor reviews, bemused viewer reaction, and disappointing box office numbers.
This second three-hour tranche of Wild West-themed soap-operatic drama, premiering at Venice, has basically the same problems as its predecessor: too much setup and not enough payoff; jagged editing that only highlights the lack of harmony between its disparate narrative strands; and cliché-tinged production values that often make it feel corny and old-fashioned, and not in a good way. And that’s allowing for the assumption that it’s aimed at the geriatric market who loved Costner’s pseudo-revisionist Western blockbuster Dancing With Wolves back in the day and his return turn to Western-adjacent form with recent TV hit Yellowstone.
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Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2
And yet, despite all that, Chapter 2 proves to be more fun to watch than 1, at least for this critic. Maybe that’s just a result of having been worn down by prolonged Horizon exposure, as I crammed in the last one the night before I saw this chunk. (This strategy is highly recommended because there’s no “last time on Horizon …” catch-up montage on offer.) Familiarity over six hours possibly breeds, if not contentment, at least some kind of cinematic Stockholm syndrome.
By the end, you too may be engaged enough to hope that pretty widow Frances (Sienna Miller) and sensitive but married soldier Trent (Sam Worthington) will have sex already and stop being so annoyingly noble. But will this win over enough viewers and generate sufficient revenue, or at least demand, for Costner, New Line and Warners to invest in the two concluding movies? The odds on that proposition look longer than they do for Trent coming back to his sweetheart from the Civil War’s front line in one piece.
Perhaps it’s the slight amplification of the female-driven storylines that makes Chapter 2 more appealing. The travails of Frances Kittredge and her 13-year-old daughter Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail), already pretty central to the earlier entry, seem to take up more space here as we see the two ladies say goodbye to Trent when his orders come through to go fight for the Union back East. It’s not like he wants to go, but at least that’s a war he can get behind, having become disillusioned with the Manifest Destiny vibes in the West where he’s expected to keep the Native population subdued so that the towns of Horizon and nearby Union can bring in yet more settlers. Then it’s time for mother and child to return to Horizon to rebuild the homestead, destroyed in the previous film in an Apache attack.
Where Chapter 1 made a somewhat credible attempt to show the indigenous points of view, particularly about their reactions to invaders of their land, their presence is minimal in this section, apart from a few peripheral characters who’ve integrated into white society. The one exception is young Sacaton (Bodhi Okuma Linton), a barely teenaged survivor of a reprisal attack that wiped out his family, who becomes secret friends with Lizzie and a dispenser of Native nature wisdom.
The burden of representing otherness here falls more on the Chinese community, nominally led by Mr. Hong (Jim Lau) although his mother (Cici Lau) and daughter (Phoebe Ho) exercise soft power. They arrive en masse in Horizon, accompanied by a cringe-inducing burst of zither-accented Orientalist music on the soundtrack, with ambitions to start a tea house and sawmill — right in time for Frances to negotiate for lumber for her new roof.
In one of the few story strands here that do start to weave with others, we spend considerable time on the trail with the wagon train met previously, reluctantly led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), who just wants to go West with his nearly silent wife and with as few fatalities as possible. That explains why, when nefarious Laplanders Sig (Douglas Smith) and his thuggish “uncle” apparently murder the foppish Brit Hugh (Tom Payne) so that they can rape his wife Juliette (Ella Hunt) repeatedly and commandeer his wagon, Van Weyden and the rest of the pioneers look away and pretend it’s not happening.
It falls to the daughters of Owen Kittredge (Will Patton), Frances’ brother-in-law who doesn’t yet know his brother is dead, to help Juliette find a way to free herself from her tormentors. Owen’s daughter Diamond (Isabelle Fuhrman) proves both the most resourceful and rebellious of the teenage girls, with a feistiness that looks designed to drive plot forward in future outings.
Finally, Costner’s own character, Hayes Ellison, having proved his mettle as a marksman in a fateful gunfight last episode, has ended up breaking horses at a trading post somewhere that’s not Horizon. This plotline maunders on rather aimlessly for a while until Ellison is presented with another opportunity to shoot a bunch of people. Elsewhere, sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee) hides, confoundingly, in the crawl space under her brothel to hide from a posse of bad guys. Oh, and Pickering (Giovanni Ribisi), the shady publisher-developer whose leaflet advertising Horizon keeps showing up, gets on a train.
While plenty of the characters fit into stock tropes — the long-suffering well-born woman, the gunman with a past, the dignified Black lieutenant, the salty, plain-speaking matron — the script by Jon Baird and Costner makes a credible effort to add some dimensionality where possible.
Likewise, the dialogue is sprinkled with the peppery argot of 19th century American speech. There are felicitous turns of phrase every so often that sound more like a screenwriter’s un-killed darling, but some are memorable enough to be allowed. The line, “This country is longer and crueler than anybody knows,” said in voiceover, is resonant and striking — a sort of bastardized echo of Louis MacNeice’s great description of “world” as a place “crazier and more of it than we think / Incorrigibly plural” in the poem “Snow.” Horizon isn’t all that crazy, but it sure is incorrigibly plural.
In terms of craft contributions, J. Michael Muro’s cinematography is once again a standout element, but then again it’s hard to take a bad shot of this Utah landscape with its brazen light and russet and ochre soil. Lisa Lovaas’ costumes are also lovely, very prairie-core demure, and if only this series of films had been a streaming series instead, they might have done for block-print calico and smocking details what Bridgerton did for Empire-waist gowns and statement sleeves.
