Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 review: Costner Western’s ending is letdown as it advertises ‘coming attractions’

HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA – CHAPTER 1

(15) 180mins

★★★☆☆

THIS Kevin Costner Western begins with a man and his son laying out a plot of land in a future settlement named Horizon.

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The locals, the Apache, welcome them with arrows and bullets, and what follows is enough sub-plots to fill a prospective city.

There is Sienna Miller’s frontier woman Frances, whose family attempt to fight off another indigenous attack, Jena Malone’s Ellen, on the run from a posse, Sam Worthington’s soldier and Luke Wilson as the leader of wagon-borne settlers seeking a better life.

Powerful punch

Arriving half way through is Costner as gold prospector Hayes Ellison, who will find himself caught up in those other stories.

As in traditional Westerns, Hayes is a good man doing the right thing when pushed into a corner.

But you won’t get to see how all their paths cross by watching this movie, as it is part one of four chapters.

Costner, also the director and co-writer, has made the sequel but needs funding for the other two.

So if you are going to invest your time in Horizon there is a chance you might never find out how it ends.

If this isn’t a box office success, will Costner have the funds to complete his saga? That would be a shame, because for all his faults, he has knitted together a decent story.

While the pace is at times ponderous, there is always some engrossing action not far around a dusty bend.

Costner certainly knows how to set up and see through a fight scene, building up the tension nicely before delivering a powerful punch.

And as with his seven-times Oscar-winning 1991 movie Dances With Wolves, the director shows both sides of the conflict.

He is sympathetic to the cause of the native Americans, whose lands are being taken by the “white eyes”.

But there are quite a few scenes which should have been jettisoned from this three-hour epic and some of the acting would feel more at home in a daytime TV drama.

The biggest letdown, however, is the ending, which is essentially a montage of clips from the forthcoming chapters.

Rather than finishing by advertising “coming attractions”, Horizon needed to focus on satisfying the audience paying to see this one.

KINDS OF KINDNESS

(18) 165mins

★★★☆☆

A NEW movie that’s typical of the type of dark satire director Yorgos Lanthimos likes to make.

There is psychotic violence, soulless sex, offbeat humour and a large dollop of weirdness.

If you haven’t seen his Poor Things, The Favourite, The Lobster or Killing Of The Sacred Deer this is not the place to start.

Mainly because Kinds Of Kindness, with a cast including Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley and Jesse Plemons, makes those very adult-themed movies feel PG by comparison.

All the actors play three different characters in three different stories. Stone cuts out her kidneys, eats human meat, appears in a husband-swap porn video and is raped.

As always she goes the extra mile, which is the theme of the trio of tales, where people take their devotion to the extreme.

Plemons is a man who will do anything for his boss and his wife, while Qualley is the stand-out, for giving some humanity and variety to her characters – a tricky feat under Lanthimos’ cold, misanthropic direction.

If you want something with feeling, I feel Kinds Of Kindness is not for you.

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

(15) 99mins

★★★★☆

IF any movie was begging to be made, it is this prequel to A Quiet Place.

The 2018 sci-fi horror, where a family fear making noise that will reveal their presence to alien predators, was one of the decade’s best box-office hits.

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Here Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) and Lupita Nyong’o (Black Panther) play strangers who are in New York on the day the killer creatures arrive from outer space.

They must learn to muffle their screams, tread carefully and find a way to safety.

For Lupita’s poet Sam, the invasion reminds her of the pull of life, as she is riddled with cancer and expects to die. Joseph’s Eric, on the other hand, had his whole life planned out and hadn’t yet contemplated death.

They are an entertaining duo in a maelstrom and the other star is Sam’s cat, who has more than nine lives.

The pace is perfect, with the monsters always a crunch or yelp away, and the humanity of the characters balancing out the action. It’s also refreshing to watch a movie that doesn’t outstay its welcome, knowing the right time to finish.

A Quiet Place is a big noise at the cinema.