With his ambitious multipart epic ‘Horizon,’ will Kevin Costner reinvigorate the Western genre or just deplete his bank account?

As a Midwestern suburban kid born during the Reagan administration, I grew up with no direct contact with cowboys, covered wagons, or the open trail. The only horses I ever came into close contact with were the coin-operated mechanical ones installed outside of supermarkets. In all the ways that matter, I am pure greenhorn.

Nonetheless, from an early age, I cottoned to the great American genre of the Western. My tastes were fairly primitive at first. I remember loving the antic Western comedies Three Amigos! and City Slickers. But even such pedestrian movies offered some of the pleasures of the genre: the glory of limitless vistas, the freedom of a man on horseback, the grizzled countenance of Jack Palance.

Later I discovered the Westerns of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Clint Eastwood, which gave modern audiences, so outwardly disconnected from the settling of the frontier, a seat at the table with the old Western heroes. Perhaps I never felt more connected to the American story than when, at age 16, I first saw Ford’s masterpiece Stagecoach and watched as the camera lurched into the first close-up of John Wayne as the Ringo Kid. This was the kind of film that you walk out of with a lope and that inspires you to start referring to everybody you meet as “pardner.”

I go into all of this backstory merely to illustrate the hold that the Western genre can hold over even the most citified or suburbanized viewers and why, despite its dismal box-office performance, I bought a ticket last weekend to see Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1. The theater was more than half-empty, but while watching this three-hour alleged bomb, my heart was full.

True-blue big-screen Westerns have become scarcer than hen’s teeth. By my lights, self-conscious postmodern Westerns like The Hateful Eight or the remake of True Grit are too studied and arch to earn full membership. This leaves Costner, in his commitment to a dying form, in the position of Custer at Little Big Horn. To be sure, I am no particular fan of Costner’s Oscar-winning but virtue-signaling Dances with Wolves, which Pauline Kael aptly compared to “a kid’s daydream of being an Indian.” (Kael also said its director-star “has feathers in his hair and feathers in his head.”) And the most I can say about Open Range and Yellowstone is “meh.” All the same, Costner is at least willing to fight this losing battle: He reportedly dipped into his own bank account to make Horizon, which was initiated with the intention of becoming a vast multipart epic. Chapter 2 is finished and was slated for release in August, but it appears the commercial catastrophe of Chapter 1 will compel Costner to pull in his horns on the as-yet-unmade future chapters.

What about the movie itself? It is a huge, ungainly flick documenting the privations and tragedies experienced by American settlers who had the notion of making a town for themselves beside an Apache river crossing in the San Pedro Valley around the time of the Civil War. As pioneers come into contact with Apache tribes, towns are raised and then razed. Early in the film, we are introduced to the Kittredge family, who, after an Apache attack, become our first victims: Father (Tim Guinee) and son (Hayes Costner) are slain, and wife (Sienna Miller) and daughter (Georgia MacPhail) are spared. There is an extraordinary sequence in which Miller and MacPhail retreat to a tunnel during the attack and their only air supply comes from the barrel of a shotgun that peeks above the ground; the scene is like the Indian attack at the start of The Searchers but longer, more violent, more relentless.

While The Searchers tells a lean and focused story, though, Horizon is more akin to a novel on film. The remaining Kittredges are relocated to a Union Army camp, where we meet a host of new characters, including the kindly, sensitive Sgt. Major Thomas Riordan (Michael Rooker) and the imposing, sonorous Col. Albert Houghton (Danny Huston). Then comes the man of the hour, Hayes Ellison, an itinerant cowboy played with authority by Kevin Costner, who awards himself a fabulous first shot that calls to mind the reveal of Wayne in Stagecoach. Hayes pairs off with Marigold (Abbey Lee), a prostitute who gives him, as Flannery O’Connor might put it, a “fast eye” — and who, it turns out, has gotten mixed up in a vendetta involving a family of miscreants called the Sykeses.

The film’s commercial failure can be attributed in part to contemporary audiences’ discomfort in making sense of many characters, incidents, and subplots in the single setting of a motion picture (as opposed to the serialized viewing experience offered on Netflix). Admittedly, director-co-writer Kevin Costner is not overly skilled at juggling them. That’s a polite way of saying that there are stretches of Horizon that are dull, plodding, and incomprehensible.

Yet I loved the film, which, in its very impenetrability, achieves a kind of perfection: The fact that we often have no idea what is going on gives the film an intriguing abstract quality. It is, merely but grandly, a succession of Western sights and sounds: an old-timer playing the harmonica, a heavyset woman sweeping her porch, bullets being loaded into guns, birch trees whose tops are touched by gold, Union officers in natty uniforms and wearing cavalry gloves. It’s all mighty purdy to look at and listen to. At some point while watching the film, it is advisable to stop trying to follow the narrative and simply enjoy the contours of each discrete scene.

To enjoy this film, it is not even necessary to fully comprehend how each character relates to one another or even why a particular character has been written into the script (co-authored by Kevin Costner and Jon Baird from a story by Kevin Costner, Baird, and Mark Kasdan). The wiser course is to simply soak in the presence of an astonishing group of actors chosen for their talent and presence rather than their (mostly nonexistent) star power, including the too-little-seen Luke Wilson as the no-nonsense captain of a wagon train and Ella Hunt as an English rose unsuited for life on the trail. Jeff Fahey and Will Patton turn up at various points too. Watching these people on horseback or by a fireside gladdens my heart.

As for the star, Kevin Costner is predictably strong and noble, and his conscious or subconscious adoption of the rough voice of his one-time director Eastwood suits him. For her part, Miller looks fetching in her Old West dresses. The cinematography by J. Michael Muro is strong, and the rich orchestral score by John Debney requires no special pleading.

The film comes to a finish with a stirring series of clips from the forthcoming second installment of Horizon, which, given the film’s present Ishtar-like status, may strike some audiences as unintentionally comic: scenes from a sequel no one wants. Yet I want it, desperately. If fans of Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the blasted Minions can have endless rehashes of their favorite “intellectual property,” I feel entitled to more scenes of gunfights, square dances, and horses kicking up dust. Let the sun never set on Horizon.

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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.