\n<\/p>\n
Thirty-four years ago, Kevin Costner<\/strong> debuted his corny, stirring, culturally iffy Western drama Dances with Wolves<\/em>. It would go on to win a heap of Oscars, including the director prize for Costner. That success seemed to augur the arrival of a new actor-turned-auteur, a whole two years before Clint Eastwood<\/strong> won his Oscar for Unforgiven<\/em>. But Costner\u2019s directorial follow-up, The Postman<\/em>, rang not even once; it was an expensive debacle that kept Costner away from the director\u2019s chair for nearly a decade. He then returned to form, on a smaller scale, for Open Range<\/em>, before going dormant once more.<\/p>\n In recent years, though, Costner has had a revival as an actor on the smash-hit neo-Western series Yellowstone.<\/em> This, in turn, has given him the cachet to once again revisit the open skies and blazing guns of his cherished genre. He quit the series (for various scheduling reasons, it has been reported<\/a>) and got to work on Horizon: An American Saga<\/em>, a four-part epic that, one hoped, would be the kind of sweeping, old-fashioned movie event (of the non-superhero or sci-fi kind) that hardly exists anymore.<\/p>\n Chapter 1 of Horizon<\/em> premiered at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival, which seemed like a good omen. Surely this swank, pomp-and-circumstance festival would only premiere a film of quality\u2014it could be a little hokey, but there\u2019s nothing wrong with that if done well. But unfortunately, Horizon<\/em> is far from stately, or even coherent. A jumble of clich\u00e9d plots rendered in washed-out color (and washed-out performances), Horizon<\/em> may rival Megalopolis<\/em> as the biggest American boondoggle<\/a> at this year\u2019s Cannes. Sure, what appears disorderly may turn out to be genius by the time we\u2019ve seen the end of the project\u2014but ten hours is an awfully long time to wait to find out.<\/p>\n