Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1

Kevin Costner has been stuck in TV land for so long with Yellowstone that Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1, his first directorial effort in 21 years, can’t help but look like something built for the small screen.

Though featuring frequent beautiful vistas, the plentiful corny but entertaining human interactions lack big-screen panache and play like a TV movie or the first three episodes of a series stitched together reasonably well.

Nevertheless, its multiple intersecting (or eventually intersecting) pieces allow Chapter 1 to move surprisingly well for a three-hour film, despite a script by Costner and first-time screenwriter Jon Baird that feels like a couple of little boys playing with action figures.

Throughout this extremely archetypal story, one wonders why these overly familiar vignettes are the stories the writing team wanted to tell. As if drawing from survey responses taken for a Western Tropes round of Family Feud, Costner and Baird go hyper-obvious with Native Americans murdering settlers; soldiers doing what they can from a fort; marauders collecting indigenous scalps; a train of covered wagons heading west; and outlaws seeking vengeance.

Also in the mix is Costner’s mysterious badass Hayes Ellison, who naturally gets to be the one who becomes chummy with prostitute Marigold (Abbey Lee, Mad Max: Fury Road). True to form, their talks are akin to the director grabbing his stand-in cowboy figurine and a Barbie doll and making up his idea of sexually charged dialogue.

Conversations are just as ill-conceived elsewhere in Chapter 1, frequently leaning on unearned sentimentality, and while the cast that Costner has assembled is impressive, the ensemble is so large that no one is developed beyond stereotypes.

But this is merely the first in Costner’s four-part series, so presumably there will be payoffs to these multiple hours of setups, including the intriguing Sykes crime family, whose members give off big Gerhardt syndicate vibes from Fargo Season Two. However, some of these actions from Chapter 2 (or 3 or even 4) may be spoiled in the bizarre close to Chapter 1 — a montage of clips from future installments that arrives without warning or context and lasts much longer than, say, the teaser for Back to the Future Part III at the end of Part II.

Hopefully those images will be forgotten by viewers before the next Horizon rolls around Aug. 16. If not, there’s always Back to the Future Part III.

Grade: B-minus. Rated R. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: Richard Foreman/Warner Bros.)