by Oscar O’Sullivan

The town of Horizon is burning. We’ve watched for minutes now as Native Americans descend upon the settlers and mow them down, setting every structure aflame and battering down the barricades of the last survivors. It’s brutally violent without being graphic, lighting and tasteful angles concealing gore without blunting the impacts. Families trapped in a burning cabin say their goodbyes as the doors are battered down. A woman with two arrows in her back crawls after the warrior riding off with her baby. A man refuses to let go of his fiddle in his dying moments, defying his killer to the last. We pull out to a wide shot of the settlement engulfed in flames, the screams and gunshots slowly drowned out by the score. As the music swells, the image cross-fades to a young boy who escaped the carnage on horseback, seen in silhouette as he gallops furiously across the horizon in the weak light of dawn. This is the most emotional and effective sequence of the entire film and it comes not even an hour into the story. It isn’t moving because of any attachment to the characters who fall in the massacre – we barely know any of them. It’s moving simply because of the rousing visuals, the awful brutality, the in-the-moment terror and heroism that the situation brings out of these ordinary people. While nothing else in the film matches this height of action storytelling, it is representative of the film as a whole – narratively worthless on paper, but completely engaging in the moment.

Can I even describe Horizon: An American Saga – Part 1 as having a story? The action hops back and forth between a half dozen locations and groups of characters, with the only piece of vaguely connective tissue being that everyone is making their way, consciously or not, towards the hypothetical town of Horizon, a patch of riverside land that is razed to the ground by the indigenous people as quickly as the settlers can build it. This first instalment lays out the main players for us – first off are the three groups directly connected to the town of Horizon. After the massacre in the film’s first act, we follow a mother and daughter who take refuge in a nearby military camp and become near and dear to the soldiers. We also pick up with the young boy I mentioned in the opening paragraph, who joins up with a gang of ruthless Indian-Hunters to get his revenge. We briefly sit in with the Native tribe behind the attack, where the wise chief casts out his warlike son for leading the massacre, with the promise of them having more importance in subsequent films. Then there’s the massive wagon train trekking across the desert, a motley and diverse crew of pilgrims trying to survive the open range long enough to reach Horizon, battling off external threats like raiders and thirst as well as dealing with internal squabbles and culture clashes. Finally we have the character played by director Kevin Costner himself, an ageing traveller who gets caught up in a blood feud to protect a prostitute and a young child who has to go on the run, with his path presumably leading to Horizon in the end. I say presumably because the film leaves oh so much unsaid – as it jumps back and forth between the separate storylines the characters continue to act offscreen, which can be disorienting if you’re not willing to accept a certain level of uncertainty. The intent becomes clear when you think of the scenes as snippets of a larger picture, even if what that larger picture is may feel unclear at times. The thematic intent is blatant, with several scenes of dialogue serving no other purpose than to wax lyrical on the dream of the unspoilt frontier and the inevitability of relentless expansion, but the overall goal of this ambitious saga remains a mystery.

Despite the meandering, elliptical bent of the film, the characters are strongly drawn enough to command our attention in a vacuum. While it would be easy to criticise the simplicity of the archetypes used, that straightforwardness is a necessity – we spend so little time with every character that we need to be able to immediately identify and understand them. Perhaps there are secrets and hidden depths to be revealed further down the road, but this first film is all about introductions, setting up characters as functions of a narrative we don’t have the full scope of yet. That’s not to say the film is entirely open-ended, with each scene having it’s own self-contained piece of drama to play out and resolve. All we learn about Costner’s character between his first appearance and the final shot of him is that his name is Hayes Ellison and he’s not afraid to shoot his way out of a tough spot. His companion Marigold has a past that is critical to how their plotline plays out but is also never explicitly elaborated upon – what matters is that she’s feisty and strong-willed but ultimately caring. Every character follows this pattern – we may not know how or why they came to be where they are, but we do know what behaviours will drive them forward in each new situation they face. Sam Worthington’s cavalry officer is a proper gentleman who always goes by the book, so maybe a later drama will test his resolve with a decision that requires bending the rules. Pilgrim leader Luke Wilson tries to keep the peace between his disparate companions, but backs down when the mysterious Russian(?) drifters in the party cause a scene – perhaps the sequels will see him forced to step up and take a stand. The Native warrior Pionsenay has his arc spelled out explicitly when he leaves his tribe behind to wage a doomed war against the white man – we can only hope that he doesn’t drag too many of his people down with him.

If it seems like I’m constantly casting my gaze forward to the next instalment, that’s because it’s almost impossible to consider this film as anything other than setup for a larger story. The film barely functions as a standalone piece of narrative fiction, to the point where it seems unfair to critique it that way. By the end I felt that I was watching a bold attempt at a new form of storytelling, the scope of a novel or television series cut up and compressed into the bounds of a feature film. The ending especially felt almost experimental – while teasing future instalments is hardly a new phenomenon in blockbuster cinema, the way Costner tees up Part 2 with this ending feels utterly alien. With none of the stories at anything that could be called a climax or turning point, we begin to jump between them all in an almost montage-like manner, giving us a snapshot of where each player is at in their journey. There’s no dialogue, limited sound effects, and as the montage stretches on and becomes more and more rapid you suddenly realise that you are watching footage of the next film, the entire arc of the Part 2 being laid out in front of you devoid of context. It’s sudden, baffling, a trailer integrated directly into the text, a promise that there’s more to come to reward your patience with all this setup – I can’t tell if it’s a sheepish consolation or a display of insane confidence in the plan. I don’t know if all this will pay off – the abstract idea of the saga could prove more interesting than the finished product – but it worked for me, and if the increasing scale of the story means more sequences like the burning of Horizon, then I’ll be a happy camper whenever Part 2 winds up coming out. 8/10.