Only a star like Kevin Costner can present himself to the world with a film that is a promise, with the first quarter of the story he wants to tell and that is a gigantic and ambitious project in four installments of the American epic and … of the geographic, historical, and social construction of the United States… Watch it, judge it, talk about it… although it is like watching, judging, and talking about the first twenty-five minutes of any other movie. Chapter 1 lasts three hours; Chapter 2, which will be released in just over a month, lasts the same amount of time, and one must think that the next two will be of a similar length.
Before entering into considerations about this quarter and a half of the film, the most urgent consideration is that Kevin Costner brings to the biggest of screens that ‘syndrome will continue’ of the small screen series. It is, therefore, an investment: it will be seen whether it is also economic, but, for now, an inversion (alteration) of the relevance of the great cinematographic story that now always seeks ‘the TVs’. But Costner is a star, a period actor, even a director of westerns almost as magnificent as some of his prestigious predecessors.
‘Horizon…’ is a western, and with all the vocation of classicism, of purity, which, although it is not clearly appreciated at the beginning, does suggest that its path can only be that. These first three hours can be considered as a long preamble, a spread on the story’s mat of the variety of characters, causes and effects that are supposed to make up the intended great American fresco: several stories that intersect and that point out and raise several of the conflicts that will develop, from the colonization of the lands, the fights with the native tribes, the adventure of building towns, creating legal systems or facing the various ‘fevers’, such as that of gold or the desire for large territories and possessions.
A panoramic film that opens with the intense dramas and characters that will probably take shape throughout the entire work, although this ‘small installment’ does not succeed in focusing on all the greatness that is promised in its journey through the Old West. It is very powerful in its start, with an episode full of cruelty in the fight between settlers and the Apache Indians who see them settle on their lands. There is drama, tragedy, tension and a certain caution on Costner’s part to correctly place the camera on both sides. Costner does not appear until well into the film, in a drastic episode in a mining town… But the saga continues and will continue, and in this first installment we see the ambition and the promise of a future.
