'Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2' Review: Kevin Costner's Western

Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 2 is the final installment in writer-director-star Kevin Costner's planned four-film series, which was released in the United States last July to mixed reviews, mixed reviews from viewers, and disappointing box office results.

This second installment of the three-hour Wild West-themed soap opera drama, premiering in Venice, has basically the same problems as its predecessor: too much setup and not enough payoff; uneven editing that only highlights the lack of harmony between its different narrative strands; and cliché-tinged production values ​​that often make it seem corny and old-fashioned, and not in a good way. And that’s assuming it’s aimed at the geriatric market that loved Costner’s pseudo-revisionist Western blockbuster. Dancing with Wolves back in time and its return to Western form with the recent television success Yellow stone.

And yet, despite all this, Chapter 2 turns out to be more fun to watch than 1at least for this critic. Maybe it's just the result of being worn out by a prolonged Horizon exposure, since I slipped the last one in the night before seeing this piece. (This strategy is highly recommended because there is no “last time on Horizon …” (recovery montage provided.) Familiarity for six hours probably generates, if not contentment, at least a sort of cinematic Stockholm syndrome.

Eventually, you too might be committed enough to hope that beautiful widow Frances (Sienna Miller) and sensitive but married soldier Trent (Sam Worthington) will have sex and stop being so annoyingly noble. But will that win over enough viewers and generate enough revenue, or at least demand, for Costner, New Line and Warners to invest in the final two films? The odds on that proposition seem lower than Trent returning to his sweetheart from the front lines of the Civil War in one piece.

Perhaps it's the slight amplification of female-driven plots that makes Chapter 2 more engaging. The ordeals of Frances Kittredge and her thirteen-year-old daughter Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail), already quite central in the previous entry, seem to take up more space here, as we see the two women say goodbye to Trent when he receives orders to go fight for the Union in the East. It's not that he wants to go, but at least it's a war he can support, having become disillusioned with the Manifest Destiny vibes out West, where he's expected to keep the native population subdued so the towns of Horizon and nearby Union can bring in even more settlers. Then it's time for mother and daughter to return to Horizon to rebuild the homestead, destroyed in an Apache attack in the previous film.

Where Chapter 1 made a fairly credible attempt to show the indigenous people's perspectives, particularly their reactions to the invaders of their land, their presence is minimal in this section, apart from a few peripheral characters who have integrated into white society. The one exception is the young Sacaton (Bodhi Okuma Linton), a barely adolescent survivor of a retaliatory attack that wiped out his family, who becomes Lizzie's secret friend and a dispenser of native nature wisdom.

Here, the burden of representing otherness falls more heavily on the Chinese community, nominally led by Mr. Hong (Jim Lau), though his mother (Cici Lau) and daughter (Phoebe Ho) wield soft power. They flock to Horizon, accompanied by a blast of zither-accented Orientalist music on the soundtrack, with ambitions to open a teahouse and sawmill, just in time for Frances to negotiate the lumber for her new roof.

In one of the few narrative threads that begins to mesh with the others, we spend a good deal of time on the trail with the wagon train we encountered earlier, reluctantly led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), who just wants to get west with his mostly silent wife and with as few casualties as possible. This explains why, when evil Lapps Sig (Douglas Smith) and his thug “uncle” seemingly kill British dandy Hugh (Tom Payne) so they can repeatedly rape his wife Juliette (Ella Hunt) and commandeer his wagon, Van Weyden and the rest of the pioneers look the other way and pretend it’s not happening.

It’s up to the daughters of Owen Kittredge (Will Patton), Frances’s brother-in-law who doesn’t yet know his brother is dead, to help Juliette find a way to free herself from her captors. Owen’s daughter, Diamond (Isabelle Fuhrman), proves to be both the most resourceful and the most rebellious of the teenage girls, with a grit that seems destined to push the plot forward in future installments.

Finally, Costner's character Hayes Ellison, after proving his worth as a marksman in a fatal shootout in the last episode, has ended up breaking horses at a trading post somewhere that isn't Horizon. This plotline rambles on pretty aimlessly for a while until Ellison is presented with another opportunity to shoot a bunch of people. Elsewhere, prostitute Marigold (Abbey Lee) is, disconcertingly, hiding in the cramped space beneath her brothel from a gang of bad guys. Oh, and Pickering (Giovanni Ribisi), the shady publisher-developer whose Horizon flyer keeps popping up, gets on a train.

While many of the characters fall into stereotypical tropes (the patient, well-born woman, the gunslinger with a past, the dignified black lieutenant, the salacious, forthright matron), Jon Baird and Costner's screenplay makes a credible effort to add some three-dimensionality where possible.

Likewise, the dialogue is peppered with the peppery slang of 19th-century American speech. There are occasional happy turns of phrase that sound more like a screenwriter's unkilled pet, but some are memorable enough to be allowed. The line, “This country is longer and crueler than anyone knows,” delivered in voice-over, is resonant and startling, a sort of bastardized echo of Louis MacNeice's great description of “the world” as a place “crazier and more than we think / Incorrigibly plural” in the poem “Snow.” Horizon It's not that crazy, but it's definitely irremediably plural.

In terms of craftsmanship, J. Michael Muro's cinematography is once again a standout, but then it's hard to take a bad picture of this Utah landscape with its brash light and rust-and-ochre soil. Lisa Lovaas's costumes are lovely, too, very prairie-like in a modest way, and if only this film series had been a streaming series, they could have done without the calico detailing and block-print smocks, which Bridgerton Bridge she created empire-style dresses with showy sleeves.