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Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 - Review

 

Cast - Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Jena Malone.

Kevin Costner - Director

         
"Looks like we got ourselves a bad man right here."
         

​​For people, the idea of spending their time in a theater is becoming more and more difficult. Prices are increasing and the variety of films one can watch is not particularly attractive. Ironically, we are now seeing the proliferation of movies with a runtime that exceeds the 3-hour mark, from the ones that have been released not all are box office successes like Oppenheimer, in the case of Killers of the Flower Moon, even after its 10 nominations at the 95th Academy Awards it only made half of its production budget, naturally it is not hard to imagine that the casual viewer will be reluctant to see a Western with that duration, which sadly Horizon was.

I think we can all agree that Westerns are a thing of the past, while Neo-Westerns keep exploring the genre and taking it to new levels, this is the exception and is becoming repetitive. If we focus on "old-fashioned" stories of the West, this is even harder to find, especially when the ones we see being released are comedies, lean heavy on sarcasm, or are deconstructions of the genre.

When Horizon: An American Saga was announced and the first teaser was released by Warner Bros. it was as if we were seeing a time traveler from the 1950s, it was so familiar and cliche that it actually felt refreshing. In many ways, Horizon feels like the culmination of the entire genre. When (or if) the 4 parts of this story get released it would without a doubt surpass How The West Was Won in terms of its scope and magnitude, even if the latter used top-of-the-line technology and attempted to cover the history of the United States.

There is a little bit of every Western in it, there's a big focus on the myths of the old West and the frontier life. If you have seen a great variety of Westerns from different eras it is easy to see where the influences are coming from. The Searchers, How The West Was Won, Dances With Wolves, Stagecoach, Santa Fe Trail, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, etc. and this is only on the first installment.

The expansiveness of the film allows characters to move freely through the story, making choices that feel believable and truthful to the era. Women are not damsels in distress like the movies of the 50s but are capable of making choices and accepting their faith. Native Americans deal with the possibility of extinction and whether it's worth fighting for their ancestral lands or accepting that this is their new reality.

It's the little details of this world, like the inclusion of Chinese workers, the posters selling the idea of the West as a land of opportunities, and the social class and division between the people traveling through the trails, that fills me with awe and certainly makes Horizon the best movie I've seen this year.

I can't wait to see the second part, which, by the sizzle reel at the end of this movie promises incredible action scenes and the union between natives and foreigners, it was supposed to be released at the end of this year but the lackluster reception of Chapter 1 has forced WB to hold the movie and reconsider its possibilities. I pray for Kevin Costner to complete his vision, one that he has been working on since Dances With Wolves and Silverado, but even if we only get two of the four planned movies it will without a doubt become one of the greatest Western stories ever put to film.

         


         

Final Score - 5/5


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