The Biggest Gamble of Kevin Costner’s Career

Kevin Costner isn’t the only present-day actor with a fondness for Westerns; ornery old hands such as Clint Eastwood, Jeff Bridges, and Tommy Lee Jones are always ready to don their ten-gallon hats for the right role. But since his movie-star career began, Costner has returned over and over again to one of cinema’s most enduring genres—which, in turn, has always been there to save him. After he first drew plaudits in Silverado, won Oscars for Dances With Wolves, and did the best filmmaking work of his career in Open Range, it’s no wonder Costner is once again setting out for the open plains.

But his newest project, Horizon: An American Saga—Chapter 1, which Costner co-wrote, directed, and stars in, is far from an easy trot back to familiar territory. As you can probably tell from its unwieldy title, the three-hour epic is just the first chunk of a series, planned to run for four chapters, the second of which is already filmed and ready for release in August. Given that he’s fresh off of dramatically exiting the hit TV show Yellowstone, a mega-soap about cattle ranchers, one might accuse Costner of simply bringing television to the big screen. The charge is hard to refute, considering how Horizon introduces several sprawling storylines across its 181-minute run time and resolves precisely none of them.

Betting that audiences will be intrigued enough to return for Chapter 2 is the kind of gamble we don’t often see in a controlled Hollywood landscape. Costner has laid his career on the line before to make movies that many executives thought were a terrible idea. Sometimes it’s worked (Dances With Wolves); sometimes it truly hasn’t (The Postman, Waterworld). Horizon might be his riskiest bet ever—especially considering the tens of millions of his own fortune he’s sunk into it—but the actual end product feels radical primarily in how it’s being told, not the story itself.

[Read: How the Western was lost (and why it matters)]

Horizon Chapter 1 is largely set during the Civil War, which is presented as a rumbling conflict in the distance. Most of the film’s action is confined to Arizona and Wyoming, territory that was just starting to be colonized by white settlers amid tension with its Indigenous population. Horizon is a settlement in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley that, the audience eventually learns, exists as an act of provocation: The U.S. military has warned against living on Apache land far outside the country’s jurisdiction. So while the aesthetics look familiar—billowing tents, ramshackle wooden storefronts, families in cowboy hats and prairie dresses—Costner wants to underline the sense of danger bubbling beneath the idyll.

That threat soon boils over, and Costner depicts an Apache attack on Horizon in unsparing, startling detail. The attack comes so early that there’s no one really to root for, no main character to glom onto, and only a couple of particularly familiar faces (Sienna Miller chief among them as a mother named Frances Kittredge) navigating the chaos. Costner himself, who plays a cowboy named Hayes Ellison, is nowhere to be seen at this point—but it’s fascinating to contrast the action here with the other films he’s directed. In Dances With Wolves, the drama revolved around a white soldier (played by Costner) on the frontier who meets the Lakota Sioux, and eventually joins them, rather than fight. In Open Range, conflict builds between rich ranchers and independent cowboys, but the action is of the old-fashioned showdown variety.

Horizon is far more brutal, but that’s clearly a message Costner is interested in communicating this time: that America’s expansion was violent, wrenching, and often amoral. After the attack, soldiers including Lieutenant Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) show up to help, but they also chastise the populace of Horizon for living so far west. Apache politics are another of Horizon’s many narrative strands, with disagreement between a warrior named Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe), who led the raid, and his more diplomatic chief, who worries that violence will invite more violence.

Costner’s prior Westerns have been more romantic, even as Dances With Wolves and similar films acknowledged the tragedy that came hand in hand with settling the West. But the attack is just one plotline in Horizon, which throws many more ingredients into the cauldron, and lets them simmer for ages. Costner’s story revolves around his character spiriting a woman named Marigold (Abbey Lee) and the child she’s watching away from a family of marauding revenge-seekers. There are occasional check-ins with a wagon train, making its way west, that’s led by a tired and stressed-out cowboy named Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson). A team of bounty hunters go out seeking revenge with nothing but murder and gold on their minds. Gephardt’s soldiers engage in a lot of heady philosophizing about the future, wondering what could come next on the bloody frontier as war rages east of them.

It's a lot, and perhaps a particularly tough sit for the older audiences Costner is likely aiming this mega-project at. The film hops from location to location without much warning, introducing new characters constantly and hoping the viewer can keep every mustachioed face straight. I was reminded of David Lynch’s masterful Twin Peaks: The Return, an 18-episode TV epic overflowing with actors that cared little for hour-by-hour narrative cohesion. That’s probably not a comparison Costner will be thrilled to hear, but I mean it as an awed compliment of sorts. Horizon might not be “watchable” in the most traditional sense of the word, but it’s audacious enough that I’ll be heading back for more in August, in anticipation of what might happen when all of these tales hopefully, eventually, collide.