Somewhere out near the San Pedro Valley River there’s a promised land, a promised town called Horizon, that’ll make real the dreams of many a settler.
The colorful flyers printed up back East by a land entrepreneur named Pickering say as much. Those attention-attracting announcements suggest that this little slice of paradise is already a thriving place.
But it’s not. It’s barely surveyed. In fact, the first hopeful settlers to make their way there find said surveyor and his family long dead.
Those hopeful families start to build anyway. And then the Apache Indians attack, burn them out and butcher the residents.
Meanwhile, a pair of brothers named Caleb and Junior Sykes are in Montana trying to track down their father’s mistress and his child. This woman might have been their father’s murderer, since she hit him with two shotgun blasts to the chest. But the elder Sykes was a tougher man than she expected. Junior and Caleb are tough, too. And both are a bit unbalanced. They plan to brutally overturn every rock until they find their quarry.
Meanwhile, there’s another wagon train on its way to that promised Horizon haven. They’ve bought their plots from Pickering. And they’re determined to prevail through the scorching desert heat and Indian threats to make their way to utopia out West.
Meanwhile, a group of hunters are out riding the southern countryside in search of a certain group of Apache killers. There’s a brand-new source of commerce that’s popped up since the massacre in Horizon. Apache scalps are now going for a premium. And in fact, the hunters are beginning to care less and less if the scalps actually belong to an Apache killer. Any old Indian scalp will still put gold in their pockets.
Meanwhile, some Apaches, led by the impassioned Pionsenay, are determined to rid their land of the white men who have tried to settle there. Their own tribe has shunned their murderous actions, but Pionsenay is not afraid to burn and hack and butcher until the white eyes understand that they’re not wanted.
Meanwhile, one of the few Horizon survivors, Mrs. Frances Kittredge, is trying to make a new life for she and her daughter Lizzy. Fortunately for them, they’re both angelic looking and beautiful. And beauty goes a long way when you’re trying to heal and start again from a horrible loss. In fact, Frances and an Army lieutenant may be on their way to romance.
Meanwhile …
Well, you get the point. There’s a lot going on in the Wild West.
As these interwoven stories unfold, it’s strongly implied that the savagery on both sides of this Native and settler conflict could have been avoided with clearer minds and better communication. Both sides have good- and kind-natured individuals who call for understanding. (But they are overridden by those with an angry bloodlust and/or a lust for money.)
When we meet Hayes Ellison, he’s trying to make his way in the West. Hayes definitely has his flaws, but he decides to protect a woman and a child he doesn’t know after a gunfight (that he was a part of) puts them in danger. He’s willing to protect them, and he works on their behalf so they can go somewhere safe.
Lizzy, a teen Horizon survivor, is sweet and kind. She meets a couple of Army cadets who are happy to help her. And when those young men are sent away on a mission, she gives them small cloth flowers to remember her by. The boys are so moved by her action, that the sergeant in charge asks that Lizzy give tokens to each of the young men in the small group under his charge. “Some will fight and die holding on to that … it’ll mean that much,” the sergeant tells Lizzy’s mom.
When soldiers from a local fort show up to help the Horizon survivors, they talk to some of the younger kids about their dead parents “going to their reward” and “being called by their Father.”
We see one family reading Scripture together during the bloody Horizon attack. “Amazing Grace” is sung during the closing credits.
An Apache elder gives a small totem to his young son, saying that he can talk to it for guidance.
Several different women display cleavage. A prostitute sits on a windowsill in a bustier, nearly exposes one breast (the camera gazes down over her shoulder). A woman named Marigold attempts to seduce men to have sex with her and we see her with two different men. One she straddles while clothed. The other we see with her as they are dressing. She reveals her bare back and part of her breast.
A young wife in a wagon train bathes herself at night with a cloth and a pitcher of water. She slowly wipes herself down. Her legs, upper body and chest are exposed, while the camera and two nearby men watch closely.
Frances Kittredge and an army officer named Gephart are attracted to each other. But he’s reluctant to express that attraction, so she prompts the issue with small verbal encouragements, a kiss on the cheek and then a kiss on the lips.
There’s quite a bit of bloodletting in the mix here. A huge attack on a settlement, for instance, features tents and buildings being set aflame while Apache warriors attack and butcher the white and Black residents. Women and children are hit in the head and face by tomahawks. People are shot in the chest and head with arrows and bullets (some in execution-style shots that splatter blood on others). Scalps are cut from people’s heads. The battle is intense and gory. We see images of dead adults and children. Young Lizzy then has to identify her dead father and brother in a brutally emotional scene.
Later Pionsenay displays his collected white scalps to his tribe.
In response, white hunters track down an innocent Indian tribe and attack after the male adults have left. They hack and shoot at the women and teens left behind—ripping and sawing scalps (just off camera). It’s all the more brutal and unnerving in the daylight. And then the scalp collectors line up their bloody rewards on a table.
A man gets shot twice in the chest with a shot gun. Another person has his fingers blown off. A family gathers together to pray and, when their attackers leap into their tent, they light a gunpowder pot that explodes in a huge, fiery eruption. We see people pouring lye on the bodies of the deceased.
Frances and Lizzy crawl into a small crumbling passageway beneath their burning house and nearly choke to death from the falling dirt and smoke. A man is pistol-whipped so badly that he falls to the ground and bleeds out. A woman is punched in the face by a large man, leaving her face swollen and bruised.
Two men get into an impromptu gunfight, and one is shot down with four bullets to the chest. A horse falls over from heat exhaustion. A boy is given a pistol and spurred to shoot an innocent man, though he refuses. People get stabbed with knives and a spear.
There’s one s-word, a use of “a–” and three uses of “h—” in the dialogue along with nearly 20 exclamations of Jesus and God’s names. (“God” is blended with “d–n” in 10 of those instances.)
A woman smokes a cigarette. An Army sergeant drinks a glass of whiskey. And two men share a swig each from a small bottle of booze. Someone carries a picnic basket that contains a bottle of alcohol.
A number of people lie and cheat to get what they want. A man urinates into a ditch in front of several people.
Horizon: An American Saga is writer/director/actor Kevin Costner’s passion project, a How the West Was Won-like epic tale that’s intended to stretch through four films.
But quite frankly this first film’s powder is pretty wet.
Don’t get me wrong, Costner has a real skill for crafting the look and feel of an old-school western. The cinematography here is gorgeous, and the (many) characters seem authentically depicted for the Civil War time period. This story commences in 1861, just as the Civil War does. But there are too many scattered pieces.
The multiple disjointed and choppy storylines—plot threads that limp and stumble like a lame horse on rocky terrain—make this narrative’s characters tough to invest in. Costner himself doesn’t even show up until an hour into this oddly balanced film. Even when he does, the storytelling is talky and banal.
Oh, and those ambling tales don’t wrap anything up by the end of the first three-hour stretch. They don’t even leave you with a decent Western cliffhanger. It all just peters out with what amounts to brief clips of what’s to come.
For that matter, the abovementioned misfires don’t even take into account the bloody visuals, rough language and brief nudity that’ll keep family audiences away from this intentionally gritty R-rated historical drama.
Maybe Horizon’s tale will start to canter smoothly by the second chapter that’s set to release in August of this year. But right now, it’s rough enough and raw enough to be a difficult ride on a bony and less-than-family-friendly horse.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
