Sorry, but Kevin Costner’s new western is both incomplete and dull

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 ★★½
(M) 181 minutes

If you want to make an epic western at present, the easy way is to relocate the frontier to a post-apocalyptic future, or to outer space. Otherwise there’s always TV. But evidently none of those options were good enough for Kevin Costner in this partly self-funded project, his first film as director since Open Range in 2003.

Sitting through the three-hour Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, I assumed I was seeing the first half of an envisaged whole, akin to an old-fashioned miniseries spread over two nights. In fact, there are four films planned, meaning Costner is operating more on the scale of James Cameron’s Avatar saga – itself a western by other means, starring Sam Worthington as a US soldier “gone native” among blue-skinned aliens, a scenario that owed something to Costner’s long-ago Oscar triumph Dances with Wolves.

Coincidentally or not, Worthington shows up again in Horizon, as a US Army lieutenant showing cautious sympathy for the “local indigenous”. Cameron, though, has been careful to ensure that his two Avatar movies so far can each be enjoyed as stand-alone spectacles – and, more vitally, that the audience knows from early on what the story is all about.

This first chapter of Horizon, by contrast, has no single story or theme: we seem to be watching a number of different westerns arbitrarily pasted together. The inciting incident, as they say in the screenwriting manuals, is an Apache raid on the frontier town of Horizon, leading the widowed heroine (Sienna Miller) to flee to an army camp where she meets Worthington’s lieutenant.

Meanwhile (there’s a lot of meanwhile) Costner himself appears as a rugged old-timer up north in Montana, where he encounters a good-hearted bad girl played by a sashaying Abbey Lee in a lacy corset and a very 1980s perm. Lee’s character is friends with another woman on the run (Jena Malone), who’s being trailed by a family of desperadoes (including Jamie Campbell Bower as a lean, chortling psycho who might have been played in another era by Keith Carradine).

Elsewhere again is Luke Wilson as the hard-pressed leader of a wagon train that includes a meek British artist (Tom Payne) and his snooty wife (Ella Hunt), along with … well, space is limited, so let’s just say there’s a lot of stuff. Much of it is as dull as you might expect with Costner and the ever-stolid Worthington as the two leading men, but around the middle of the second hour, intrigue does start to build, if never as consistently as you’d hope.

In its day, Dances with Wolves drew both praise and criticism as a “politically correct” western (“woke” would be the term nowadays). Misogyny is a theme in Horizon, and Costner still strives to be “fair” to his Native American characters, but on balance his approach here is far more traditional than revisionist.