A three hour, chapter one Western?

Kevin Costner’s epic Western Horizon: An American Saga debuted this weekend. At least, the first part of the movie debuted this weekend while Chapter Two will arrive in August.

This film looked beautiful. There were some decent performances. However, the film has its share of problems that outweigh the positives.

What are the problems? Well, there are a bunch of characters and storylines and it feels as if there are too many. Even for three hours, they bounced around to these different storylines, all that were interesting to be fair, and it never got a good feel for any of them. There were so many characters that half the time, I was never sure who was who and what each one of them were doing.

It did feel as if Kevin Costner wanted this film to be sweeping, with multiple plots going on at once, and it felt as if some of them should have been tightened up or removed to make it more cohesive.

The last five minutes of the film featured, I assume, scenes put to music from the next film. This montage was confusing and felt silly.

There were scenes that were enjoyable, but I just do not think it matters because the story is so scattered and the characters are not as developed as they should be.

2.8 stars