• Rotten Tomatoes 32% (19 Reviews)
  
• Metacritic: 50 (16 Reviews)
  

Working from a discursive screenplay he co-wrote with Jon Baird, Costner is not at his best as a director with this kind of multi-branched narrative. He struggles to keep all the story’s plates spinning, as characters are sidelined and resurface with too little connective tissue.

For Costner, this is an impressive beginning, with the promise of more to come.

There’s a hallowed place in cinema for multi-character dramas. But “Horizon,” simply put, doesn’t feel like a movie. It feels like the seedbed for a miniseries. Much of what happens is wispy and not very forceful; the film doesn’t build in impact, and it seldom seems to aim in a clear direction.

The film is earnest yet hopeful, with crisply drawn characters - but perhaps its full grandeur won’t be fully realised until part two.

A rigorous and handsome drama, finely hewn by Costner and his cast, this is an absorbing ride into the Old West.

Beautifully shot, with a deft command of period detail and a starry ensemble cast, Costner’s Civil-war set epic offers an old-fashioned celebration of the pioneer spirit – and a clutch of storylines that never quite have time to engage before the film moves on.

Despite the shootouts, some epic vistas (frankly, not as much as you’d expect), and a few fleeting moments of genuine tension, it all feels flat.

These aren’t characters so much as the spokes of a plot in human form, each of their storylines moving as if being pulled by horses across the entire span of the American West.

In some ways, Horizon reminded me of Costner’s 2003 western Open Range, but that had a much more interesting performance from Costner and first-rate support from Robert Duvall and Michael Gambon. The acting here is far less impressive, and less directed. There isn’t much on the horizon here

Credit where credit is due, Kevin Costner has made what is essentially a three-hour prologue into something that is occasionally moderately entertaining. However, just as often, Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 woefully wanders every which way.

The biggest problem with Horizon is that, even with its lengthy running time, Costner has only scratched the surface of the “saga” he’s trying to tell. There is no arc to what happens, just the seemingly unending introduction of characters.

At least Horizon accomplishes one staggering feat: it makes one wonder if we were maybe a little too hard on The Postman.

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