The Wayward Conservative Fantasies of Kevin Costner

The opening siege sequence dares to evoke a strain of retrograde representation, similar to a passage in the Coens’ 2018 Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs but without that film’s conceptual safety net. There, the arrival of a murderous, unknowable Native American Other was contextualized by the script’s framing device of a vintage dime-store adventure story. Costner offers no such escape hatch and, for nearly 30 harrowing minutes, runs roughshod over the politically correct legacy of Dances With Wolves. In the next scene, we see the Apache’s war chief condemning the attack on both moral and tactical grounds, warning his community of the bloody retribution to come. The inexorability of vengeance is a thesis: Arriving in the aftermath of the massacre to herd the survivors to safety at a nearby U.S. Army base, a general played by Danny Huston explicates the nature of manifest destiny, effectively paraphrasing another Coens modern-dress gunslinger riff, No Country for Old Men, that you can’t stop what’s coming. Idealism is dangerous, and reality is dirty: Trudging over a muddy mountain stream in another frontier outpost (this one in snowy Wyoming), a cynical visitor likens the town below to a urinal, a nascent (and) literal example of trickle-down economics.

Such rhetoric is prelude to a (figurative) pissing contest—one that turns fatal for the instigator, who’s gunned down with good cause by a decent man played, inevitably and necessarily, by Costner himself. Given the mostly B-list status of Horizon’s other cast members, Costner’s innate magnetism transcends the relative marginality of his role as a horse trader who ends up protecting a wayward prostitute (Abbey Lee) from a pair of fraternal bounty hunters, although he’s been sure (with co-writer Jon Baird) to make his character both a dead-eyed crack shot and an aw-shucks lady-killer. The issue with Costner’s acting here isn’t (simply) an aging A-lister’s narcissism, however; it’s that his character is lost somewhere in the zone between archetype and cliché—a conceptual crevasse that keeps threatening to swallow the film’s sprawling ensemble of homesteaders, soldiers, scalp hunters, entrepreneurs, religious zealots, and racialized outcasts whole. It’s one thing to style your movie as a maximalist throwback teeming with tactile details, and another to stretch that collection of tropes and textures so thin that they start tearing at the seams. The flip side to Costner having such a steady directorial hand is that it’s also heavy: Where a movie like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (whose oil-derrick-size shadow falls over the proceedings) is willfully elliptical, Horizon is simply frenetic, cross-cutting between locations and character arcs in an attempt to generate a galloping sense of convergence.

To give Costner a bit of a break in exchange for his reported 10-figure investment, the unevenness of Horizon’s first chapter may be a by-product of its larger conception as a jumbo-size serial; what seems like simple goldbricking at three hours may look more purposeful after 12. (Or not). The putative climax is an attack by bloodthirsty white mercenaries on an Apache outpost whose intended counterpoint with the earlier destruction of Horizon is undermined by its comparative (and dubious) brevity; the real ending, though, is a wordless, turbocharged montage of scenes (and spoilers) from the upcoming sequel, a surreal flourish that doubles as a Marvel-style hard sell.