Alejandro Edda | Through the Shattered Lens

Horizon: An American Saga: Chapter One is the rather unwieldy title of the first part of what Kevin Costner has said will be an epic four-part movie about the settling of the American frontier.

It’s very, very long.

It has a running time of three hours, during which time a lot of characters are introduced and a lot of plotlines are initiated but, because this is the only first chapter, none of them come to a close. In fact, as the film ends, it’s still a mystery as to how some of the characters are even related. I watched all three hours and I took my ADD meds this morning so you can be assured that I was actually paying attention. That said, I still struggled to keep track of who everyone was or even where they were in proximity to each other. Indeed, it was only towards the end of the film that I realized that several years were supposed to have passed over the course of the first chapter’s running time.

That’s not to say that the film is a disaster. While it’s not quite the nation-defining epic that Costner obviously envisioned it as being, it’s also not quite the cinematic atrocity that several critics made it out to be. It’s a throwback of sorts, to the epic westerns of old. As such, the film features taciturn gunslingers, a woman with a past, dangerous outlaw families, fierce Indian warriors, and a wise Indian chief who has dreamed of the coming of the white man. The film is full of actors — like Michael Rooker, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington, Danny Huston, Will Patton, James Russo, Dale Dickey, and Kevin Costner himself — who feel as if they belong to a different era of filmmaking. Just about everyone in the film is heading to the settlement of Horizon, which sits in Apache territory. Despite the efforts of the Indians to kill every settler who shows up, they keep coming. As one army officer explains it, the Indians have made the mistake of thinking that the settlers will come to believe the land is cursed while the settlers, all of whom are full of American optimism, instead chose to believe that the previous settlers were unlucky but that the next wave of settlers will make it work. Costner has the right visual sensibility for a western. The film reveals a director who is obviously in love with the Western landscape and the film is at its best when it simply frames the characters against the beauty of the frontier. But when it comes to actually telling a compelling story, he struggles. There are a lot of moving parts to the first chapter of Horizon and the problem is not that they don’t automatically connect but instead that Costner never gives us any reason to believe that they’ll ever connect. There are no visual clues or bits of dialogue to assure the viewer that everything they’re watching is going to eventually pay off. Costner asks his audience to have faith in him and remember that he directed Open Range and Dances With Wolves while forgetting about The Postman.

The first hour, which features a brutal raid on the settlement by a group of Indians, is the strongest. It really drives home the brutality of what we now call the old west. In the style of Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Costner closely observes the individual customs of the film’s settlers and carefully introduces several appealing characters who leave the viewer feeling as if they’ve met a very special and very unique community of people. That makes it all the more devastating when the majority of those characters are subsequently wiped out with casual cruelty in a raid led by the Indian warrior Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe). (Later — much later — a tracker played by Jeff Fahey will show similar brutality while wiping out a group of Apaches.) The first hour establishes the frontier as being beautiful but also dangerous and it also drives home the mix of determination, desperation, and even madness that led so many to follow Horace Greeley’s advice and “Go west!” Though the film was shot in early 2023, the brutality of the raid brought to mind the terrible images of the October 7th attacks on Israel. The subsequent scenes in which Pionesenay and his followers ridiculed those in the tribe who wanted peace mirrored the current schism that’s driving apart the worldwide Left. The U.S. Army, for their part, arrives a day late and can only offer up not-so subtle condescension. The surviving settlers, however, remain determined to make a home for themselves.

The second hour focuses on Hayes (played by Costner), who rides into a mining town and gets involved with a family of outlaws who are looking for the woman who shot their father. The second hour is a bit more of a traditional western than the first hour, though some of the violence is still shockingly brutal. (Even being comedic relief won’t save you in this film.) Abbey Lee gives a good performance as the woman with a past and a baby and Kevin Costner is …. well, he’s Costner. He could play this type of role in his sleep.

The third hour is a mess, introducing a wagon train and featuring a miscast Luke Wilson as the leader of the settlers and Jeff Fahey giving a strong performance as a ruthless tracker. The third hour meandered as a whole new set of characters were introduced and I was left to wonder why the film needed new characters when the characters from the first two hours were perfectly adequate. It was during the third hour that I started to really get impatient with the film and its leisurely approach to storytelling.

The film ends with a montage of what we can expect from the next few chapters of Horizon and I will say that the montage actually looked pretty cool. That’s because the montage was almost totally made up of action scenes, with none of the padding that caused Chapter One to last an unwieldy three hours despite only having 90 minutes worth of story. Still, one has to wonder if we’ll actually get to see the next three chapters. The first chapter bombed at the box office and didn’t exactly excite critics. Costner is producing and financing the films himself and I doubt he’ll give up on them. The Horizon saga will be completed but will it made it to theaters or will it just end up on streaming? Personally, I think the whole thing would work best as a miniseries but who knows? (If Horizon was airing on Paramount, it would probably be a Yellowstone-style hit.) All I really do know is that Chapter Two has yet to be released. And that’s a shame because, for all of Chapter One‘s flaws, I’d still like to see how the story turns out.

Oh, Tom Cruise.

You magnificent and problematic bastard.

Tom Cruise has become so associated with Scientology and all of its creepy excesses that it’s sometimes easy to forget that he’s always been a pretty good actor and he’s actually getting better with age. In the Mission Impossible films, he’s proven that he can be a better James Bond than Daniel Craig. In Edge of Tomorrow, he and Emily Blunt brought real depth to what could have just been another generic action film. Even as bad as The Mummy may have been, the film failed because of a bad script and bad direction. Tom Cruise’s performance was actually one of the few things in that movie that did work.

And then there’s American Made.

Directed by Edge of Tomorrow‘s Doug Liman, American Made is supposedly based on a true story. At least as portrayed in this film, Barry Seal was an airline pilot who, in the late 70s, was recruited by the CIA to fly over Central America and take pictures of communist rebels. An adrenaline junkie who had grown bored with his day job, Barry quickly agreed and even got a thrill out of the rebels shooting at him as he flew over. Barry was then recruited by the Medellin Cartel and soon, he was flying drugs into the United States while still working for the CIA. While the President was declaring war on drugs, Barry was attending secret meetings at the White House. The CIA set Barry up with his own airport in Mena, Arkansas, where he both trained anti-communist guerillas and arranged for the importation of cocaine into the United States. This went on until both the CIA and the Colombians decided that Barry knew too much and was expendable.

It’s a pretty wild story and, at the very least, some of it is true. It is generally acknowledged that Barry Seal worked for both the CIA and the Medellin Cartel and that the little town of Mena, Arkansas was, briefly, the very unlikely center of America’s drug trade. The film places most of the blame on Ronald Reagan and the Bushes. Of course, if you ask any of the older folks in Arkansas, they’ll tell you that Bill Clinton not only knew about the cocaine coming in to Mena but that he also snorted at least half of it up his nose. Director Doug Liman, himsef, has said that American Made was inspired by the life of Barry Seal but that its shouldn’t necessarily be considered a biopic.

Despite a few scenes where the film tries a bit too hard to duplicate the style of American Hustle, American Made is an entertaining film. That’s largely due to Tom Cruise’s performance as Barry. Cruise plays Barry Seal as man who, no matter what the situation, always managed to have a good time and, watching American Made, you can’t help but suspect that Tom Cruise was having an equally good time playing him. Cruise is at his most relaxed and charismatic in American Made, even managing to deliver his lines in a passable Southern accent. (The rest of the cast is less successful, too often sounding quasi-Texan even though they’re playing Arkansans.) Even after his whole operation has fallen apart and Barry knows that his days are numbered, you get the feeling that he wouldn’t change a thing. He just seems like he’s happy to have had the experience.

(For me, Cruise’s best moment comes after Barry crashes his airplane in a suburban neighborhood. Stepping out the wreckage, covered in cocaine, Barry steals a kid’s bike and says, “You didn’t see me!” before triumphantly riding off. It’s potentially cartoonish but Cruise sells the scene and makes it work. I was sad to discover, while researching this review, that this apparently didn’t actually happen.)

I liked American Made. It never quite becomes the savage critique of American foreign policy that it appears to want to be but it’s still an entertaining film and a reminder that, weird religious beliefs aside, Tom Cruise is actually a pretty good actor.