Kevin Costner’s ‘Horizon’ Is a Misogynistic, Racist, Retrograde Mess
Early on into the three hours of viewing Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 I thought back to last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where I saw Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for the first time. That brilliant movie is a full throated condemnation of the genocide of Native Americans by white people who claim the U.S. as their own. Horizon is not that.
Instead, one of the inciting incidents in the unwieldy film that Costner directs is a violent Apache assault on a settlement. The mostly white settlers are portrayed as terrified innocents. Sienna Miller’s Frances hides underneath her house with her similarly blonde daughter (Georgia MacPhail) while her husband and son are murdered. They are shot in beatific fashion, meanwhile, the Native American assailants are shadowy figures who attack unprovoked. There are nods to nuance that come later, but far too little in the first part of Costner's passion project, which debuted at the festival.
Everything about Horizon is retrograde. Men are noble heroes (like Hayes Ellison, the drifter played by Costner) or brutes who toss around the women, themselves either saintly like Miller or frivolous and nagging. Even the score from John Debney, with its sweeping strings, feels like it was piped in the ’90s. But Costner was better in that era—there’s more nuance in Dances with Wolves than there is here.