Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter 1 – Review, Goes West Young America

I distinctly remember the release of the film in Italy. The Fellowship of the Ringfirst chapter of the film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings directed by Pater Jackson. One of the most recurring criticisms was that the film had no ending, but rather stopped, so to speak, waiting for the subsequent films to complete the story. The idea of ​​a “serial film” was unknown to many viewers at the timewhich seemed absurd to him.

Twenty-two years later, a format like this no longer surprises anyone, on the contrary: it is Almost become The standard of blockbuster productions, starting from the never-ending superhero film saga Marvel (and of the unfortunate emulators of the DC Universe). So when Kevin Costner announced his return to directing with a four-film Western epic, and I don’t think anyone raised an eyebrow.

L’idea behind it Of Horizon: An American Saga and of Telling 12 Years of American History astride the Civil war (1861-65), focusing in particular on the colonization/conquest of the western territories of the continent, an epic that the American people have historically referred to with the concept of Manifest Destinyor the presumption that Divine Providence itself had inscribed this path in the History of the United States nation. To stage such an ambitious historical fresco, the film script Of Jon Baird and Kevin Costner himself opts for a choral story that follows the vicissitudes of a plethora of characters, atomizing the great story of the birth of a nation into many small individual epics. Almost as if to say that talking about “American History” necessarily means talking about “American Stories”.

The History, the Stories

So there are multiple narrative lines of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1. It begins with the unfortunate fate of a colony founded in a bend of the river Saint Peter by white men in search of fortune (who will instead find the Apaches’ arrows waiting to welcome them), the story continues Camp Gallantthe last outpost of the United States Army before the great unknown, engaged in controlling the frontier, welcoming the surviving settlers and the inevitable sending of fresh recruits to die in the trenches of the Civil War.

But there is also room for the stories of a group of bounty hunters engaged in a punitive expedition against the indigenous peoplewhose point of view is quickly offered through the discussion between the young warrior Pionsenay and the chieftain Tuayeseh about the opportunity or otherwise of an open clash with the “light eyes”.

Somewhere else, between Montana and Wyomingfollows the adventures of Lucy, a woman on the run from the powerful Skyes clan, whose head she killed who had reduced her to a sexual slave. Lucy lives under a false name and the appearance of a respectable family, married to the fixer Walter who takes in her and her newborn Sam, but she is constantly hunted. And just at the moment of maximum danger, appears Hayes Ellison (Kevin Costner, who abandoned the Yellowstone series to embark on this gigantic production), a horse trader who finds himself unwittingly entangled in this affair, and forced to go into hiding, taking little Sam and the prostitute Marigold, who was looking after the child on behalf of his mother, to safety.

The last of the six narrative lines offered by the film concerns the journey of a caravan of settlers along the Santa Fe Traila connecting trail between Mexico and Missouri, and the efforts made by Commander in Chief Matthew Van Weyden to keep the community together and quell its conflicts, including the absurd demands of a young British bourgeois couple who naively think they can transplant the good manners of the English aristocracy in the frontier lands.

An overwhelming amount of stories and places which is initially difficult to follow, due to the time lags and the overly elliptical editing of Miklos Wrightwhich passes with ease from one setting to another without too many logical connections and instills the suspicion of significant cuts, with the result that on several occasions the film seems to lack connecting scenes and is full of sudden changes both in the pacing of the narrative as much as in the characterization of the characters and in the evolution of their mutual interactions.

Just to give an example, during the film we witness two characters falling in love through two scenes – yes, two in number! – that barely hint at the emergence of a mutual interest. The whole film is like this: in general the script forbids the characters from any psychology or in-depth studymaking them narrative functions and an action complement to the magic of the uncontaminated landscapes that follow one after the other in the best promotional operation of the territory of Wild America that has been seen on the big screen for many years.

Will and Destiny

Ultimately, this reduction of the characters to parts of the landscape contributes to the thematic thrust of the film, namely Costner and Baird’s questioning of the sense of individual effort in the grand scheme of history.

Very significant in this regard is a explicit exchange of words between two Camp Gallant officerswho wonder about theoutcome of colonization of the West: will America succeed and unify the continent? Or will the efforts made and the blood shed have been in vain? One of the two officers says he is certain that the colonists will succeed in their intent, but the moment this happens there will be nothing left to see: the immense space of the frontier, with its load of dreams and promises, will be divided up and transformed into a banal object of sale for landowners and speculators, and the dream of a collective Eden will be shattered against the human logic of rights, law and economics.

This brief passage is probably the emotional apex of the film and it is almost a shame that it slips away as a mere interstice between one macro-sequence and another. However, its very evanescence is symptomatic of the idea of ​​its authors, who look with a mixture of admiration and nostalgia to that mythical past in which the many individual stories that the film celebrates are inevitably destined to be swept away by the great course of Historya succession of events guided by a Destiny that has no qualms about thwarting the dreams, ambitions and lives of many for the benefit of others, based on an inscrutable will that governs everything.

If the irresolvable conflict between Will and Destiny is placed as the thematic basis of Horizon, this Chapter 1 has the fault of introducing it without being able to exhaust it, giving the film an inevitable impression of incompleteness, poetics even before that storytelling. If nothing else, the cine-serial format conceived by Costner, which foresees the release of each of the four chapters in theaters approximately six months apart from each other, will not leave too much time to pass to fully explain his theory. The appointment with the Chapter 2 it is already set at August 15th for Italian theaters.