Review of “Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2”: Kevin Costner Western

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2 is the latest installment in writer, director and star Kevin Costner's planned four-part film series, which arrived in the US last July to many poor reviews, confused audience reactions and disappointing box office numbers.

This second three-hour episode of the Wild West soap opera drama, premiering in Venice, has essentially the same problems as its predecessor: too much setup and too little impact; choppy editing that only highlights the lack of harmony between the different storylines; and cliched production values ​​that often make the film seem cheesy and old-fashioned, and not in a good way. And that suggests it's aimed at the senile market that loved Costner's pseudo-revisionist Western blockbusters. Dances with Wolves then and his return to Western-like form with the recent TV hit Yellowstone.

And despite all this Chapter 2 is more fun than 1at least for this critic. Perhaps this is just the result of exhaustion from long horizon exposure, as I squeezed in the last one the night before watching this piece. (This strategy is highly recommended, as there is no “last time on horizon (…“ Catch-up editing on offer.) Familiarity over six hours may produce, if not satisfaction, then at least a kind of cinematic Stockholm syndrome.

By the end, you might even be so engrossed that you hope that pretty widow Frances (Sienna Miller) and sensitive but married soldier Trent (Sam Worthington) will finally 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 chances of that are worse than Trent returning unscathed from the front lines of the Civil War to his sweetheart.

Perhaps it is the slight strengthening of the female-dominated storylines that Chapter 2 more engaging. The travails of Frances Kittredge and her 13-year-old daughter Lizzie (Georgia MacPhail), who played a central role in the earlier installment, seem to take up more space here, as we see the two ladies bid farewell to Trent when his orders come to fight for the Union in the East. It's not that he wants to go, but at least this is a war he can support, as he's disillusioned with the Manifest Destiny vibes in the West, where he's supposed to keep the native population under control so that the towns of Horizon and nearby Union can absorb even more settlers. Then it's time for mother and child to return to Horizon to rebuild the homestead that was destroyed in an Apache attack in the previous film.

Where Chapter 1 Although the series has made a somewhat credible attempt to show the Native American point of view, particularly their reaction to intruders on their land, their presence in this section is minimal, aside from a few peripheral characters who have assimilated into white society. The only exception is the young Sacaton (Bodhi Okuma Linton), a barely teenage survivor of a retaliatory attack that wiped out his family, who is secretly friends with Lizzie and imparts Native wisdom about nature.

The burden of representing difference here falls more to the Chinese community, nominally led by Mr. Hong (Jim Lau), although his mother (Cici Lau) and daughter (Phoebe Ho) wield soft power. They arrive in Horizon in droves, accompanied by an awkward burst of zither-accented oriental music on the soundtrack, and have ambitions to open a teahouse and sawmill—just in time for Frances to negotiate lumber for her new roof.

In one of the few plot threads that begins to intertwine with others, we spend considerable time on the road with the wagon train we met earlier, reluctantly led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson), who simply wants to head west with his nearly silent wife and with as few casualties as possible. This explains why Van Weyden and the rest of the pioneers look the other way and pretend nothing is happening when the nefarious Laplanders Sig (Douglas Smith) and his brutal “uncle” apparently murder the foppish Brit Hugh (Tom Payne) so they can repeatedly rape his wife Juliette (Ella Hunt) and take over his wagon.

It's up to the daughters of Owen Kittredge (Will Patton), Frances' brother-in-law who doesn't yet know his brother is dead, to help Juliette find a way to free herself from her tormentors. Owen's daughter Diamond (Isabelle Fuhrman) proves to be the most resourceful and rebellious of the teens, with a vivacity that is intended to drive the plot forward in future films.

And finally, Costner's own character, Hayes Ellison, who proved his marksmanship skills in a fateful shootout last episode, is forced to break horses at a trading post somewhere other than Horizon. This storyline plods along rather aimlessly for a while until Ellison gets another opportunity to shoot a few people. Meanwhile, sex worker Marigold (Abbey Lee) is confusingly hiding in the crawl space beneath her brothel to hide from a gang of bad guys. Oh, and Pickering (Giovanni Ribisi), the shady publisher and developer whose promotional brochures for Horizon keep popping up, boards a train.

While many of the characters fit common clichés – the long-suffering woman from a good family, the gunman with a past, the dignified black lieutenant, the dour, outspoken matron – Jon Baird and Costner's script makes a credible effort to give the film a certain multidimensionality wherever possible.

Likewise, the dialogue is peppered with the sharp jargon of 19th-century American speech. There are occasional apt turns of phrase that sound more like a screenwriter's unblemished favorite, but some are memorable enough to pass. The line “This land is longer and crueler than anybody knows,” spoken in voiceover, is resonant and evocative – a kind of corrupted echo of Louis MacNeice's great description of the “world” as a place “madder and more of it than we think / Incorrigibly plural” in the poem “Snow.” horizon isn't that crazy, but it's definitely incorrigible plural.

In terms of craftsmanship, J. Michael Muro's cinematography is once again a standout, but then again, it's hard to take a bad shot of this Utah landscape, with its glaring light and reddish-brown and ochre ground. Lisa Lovaas' costumes are also beautiful, very understated in the prairie style, and if this film series had been a streaming series instead, they might have gone for block-printed calico and smocking details what Bridgerton did this for dresses with empire waists and statement sleeves.