July 2024
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (R)
11/07/24 22:24 Filed in: 2024
Starring: Kevin Costner
June 2024
Warning! This is NOT a movie review. This is a critique of the film. Intended to initiate a dialogue, the following analysis explores various aspects of the film and may contain spoilers. For concerns over objectionable content, please first refer to one of the many parental movie guide websites. Ratings are based on a four star system. Happy reading!
1859
San Pedro Valley
Some Caucasian settlers mark off property boundaries near a river. Two indigenous boys assume the strange behaviors are part of a game.
Sometime later, an old man rides up to the river and finds the dead bodies of the settlers. He buries them and moves on.
Montana Territory
A woman shoots a man with a rifle, puts a baby in her carriage, and rides away.
Back at the first location, an Apache war party burns down a village that’s sprung up near the river, brutally killing men, women and children. Only a handful of people survive.
Wyoming Territory
A man arrives in a mining town and immediately finds trouble when he befriends a local prostitute, who unwittingly maneuvers him into a deadly shootout.
And on and on the story goes…meandering like one of the movie’s many rivers.
From this scattershot synopsis of Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1, you’ve probably guessed that the story is a loose association of Western vignettes, some of which eventually merge, while others remain standalone subplots. Costner, who served as actor, director, co-writer and producer on the movie, sunk $38 million of his own money into this passion project. The first of a planned four-movie series, Horizon returns the renowned Yellowstone actor to familiar terrain (Silverado, Dances with Wolves, Wyatt Earp) and is the first Western film he’s directed since the truly fine range war drama Open Range (2003).
When standing behind the camera, Costner’s goal was to match the quality of the Westerns from Hollywood’s classical period…a tall order. He adopts many elements from Golden Era films (continuity editing, cause and effect storytelling and “invisible style” framing) for his character scenes. By contrast, Costner employs many modern cinematic techniques (swish pans, quick cutting and handheld camera filming) for the movie’s handful of fight scenes. While the film’s locations are absolutely spectacular, my preference would’ve been for Costner to let the vista shots “breathe” a little more (like the many exquisite prairie shots in Dances with Wolves) instead of immediately cutting back to the characters. But maybe he was trying to trim action where he could due to the movie’s interminable length.
Costner’s performance, as drifter Hayes Ellison, is typically understated and typically solid. Joining Costner onscreen is a panoply of veteran stars and character actors. Sam Worthington (Avatar) is particularly good as the leader of a cavalry troop. While Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead) delivers a fine performance as a cavalry soldier, his thick Irish brogue makes it difficult to understand what he’s saying. Sienna Miller (American Sniper) and Jena Malone (Sucker Punch) make the most of their limited parts. Other familiar faces pepper the cast, like Will Patton, Tim Guinee, Danny Huston, and Giovanni Ribisi. For my money, the two best performances in the movie come from Luke Wilson, who plays the unelected leader of a wagon train who’s just trying to keep the peace, and Abbey Lee, who portrays Mary, the duplicitous prostitute who selects Hayes as her mark.
With so many superlative aspects of the film, why such a low rating? It’s all about the story, or lack thereof. The script, written by Costner, Jon Baird and Mark Kasdan, is deficient on nearly every level. Simply put, if you like movies with intricate plots, finely-crafted dialog and at least a little levity, Horizon isn’t for you. (Also, if you have bladder issues, Horizon definitely isn’t for you.)
Despite scant character development, we’re just expected to join Costner on his joyless journey into a ferocious frontier. Problem is, we barely get to know one set of characters before he shifts focus to another group of characters, and so on. When the Apaches attack the settlers, we’re sorry that they’re slaughtered, but we have no emotional investment in the characters since we just met them and know nothing about them.
Compounding this issue, we’re often dropped into the middle of a scene with characters we don’t know. By the time we kinda’ figure out what’s going on, we jump to another storyline. Rinse and repeat. It was literally halfway through the film (when Mary decides to leave with Hayes) when I first felt some forward momentum in the plot.
The strangest aspect of Horizon is that it ends with a dialog-free montage of clips from future movies in the series. This stunt reminded me of the preview of Back to the Future Part III at the end of Back to the Future Part II. But here, there isn’t any on-screen text or a voice-over narration to explain what’s happening. The movie ends with Ribisi peering out a shop window with a look of bewilderment on his face. After investing three hours in this substandard jaunt into the Old West, we know exactly how he feels.
Though faith was a significant part of most people’s lives during this period of American history, Horizon is extremely dismissive in the way it treats religion; it presents Judaism, Catholicism and Christianity as relics from the past, dead and buried in the sin-stained wilderness. Sure, we occasionally encounter a Christian symbol, like the cross that stubbornly stands atop the only remaining wall of a dilapidated mission, or when a man buries a trio of bodies and places three wooden crosses above their graves, but that’s about the extent of anything overtly religious in the movie.
The only direct reference to the Bible is when a woman reads from Psalm 23 right before she ignites a keg of gunpowder and sends everyone (her family and the encroaching Apaches) in the immediate vicinity to kingdom come. Ironically, she doesn’t adhere to the very scripture she quotes, which admonishes her to “fear no evil.”
If Costner’s goal with Horizon was to portray the true history of the American West for modern audiences and future generations, he’s failed miserably. His version of the Old West is replete with bitter, vile and unsavory characters who lack even basic morality, with nary a God-fearing soul to be found in the rascal-ridden realm.
We’re taken inside several bars and brothels, but does Costner’s camera cross the threshold of a church? Nope. The movie has plenty of bullets, but does it have any Bibles? Nope. One of the main characters is a prostitute, but is there a priest among the cast? Nope.
In short, Costner’s Hollywood-ized, revisionist history of the American West eschews accurate portrayals of faith and family in favor of all manner of wanton acts committed by vain, profane and lecherous individuals. Even protagonist Hayes’ actions are far from heroic. It’s frightening to think that many impressionable young people who see this film will accept it an accurate account of the Old West.
The hymn “Amazing Grace” is sung (rather poorly) over the end credits. This seems like a makeup call for a movie that grossly underrepresents the beliefs of the era it seeks to depict.
In the end, Horizon is an exceedingly barbaric, yet terminally boring, tale that comes complete with cardboard characterizations, confusing crosscutting, unexplained time jumps and a jarring montage at the end of the film.
On the plus side, Costner’s historical epic is well-acted and beautifully filmed. However, it’s marred by shallow character development and a threadbare plot. So, what’s the end result of all these elements? Horizon is the greatest Western live-action cartoon ever made. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find a more pedestrian, less enjoyable Western than Costner’s clunker.
And the really bad news…with three more three-hour Costner pics in the works, there appears to be no relief on the horizon.
Rating: 2 out of 4
The Watchers (PG-13)
11/07/24 22:23 Filed in: 2024
Starring: Dakota Fanning
June 2024
Warning! This is NOT a movie review. This is a critique of the film. Intended to initiate a dialogue, the following analysis explores various aspects of the film and may contain spoilers. For concerns over objectionable content, please first refer to one of the many parental movie guide websites. Ratings are based on a four star system. Happy reading!
Mina (Dakota Fanning) is a bored pet store employee who prefers vaping and doodling in her sketchbook to doing actual work. Her boss asks her to deliver a golden parakeet to a nearby town in Ireland. She reluctantly agrees, probably figuring a drive through the country would be preferable to staring at lizards and snakes all day. Most people would question their GPS when finding themselves on a single-track dirt road in the middle of a dense forest, but not Mina.
When her car dies, Mina strolls into the forest to find help, but immediately gets lost. As night approaches, she encounters Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), an old woman who tells her to get inside a concrete bunker before vicious creatures (Watchers) come out to hunt. Once safely inside the large rectangular room, Mina meets the other survivors, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan). They mindlessly recite the rules as if in a trance: don’t open the door after dark, don’t turn your back on the mirror, don’t go near the burrows (giant holes in the ground), etc.
During the day, the four survivors go outside to hunt for small game, collect medicinal herbs and venture out as far as they dare in every direction to make a map of the region…but they must always return by sundown. One night, there’s a banging at the door. It’s Ciara’s husband John (Alistair Brammer), who’s been missing for several days. His urgent cries for help are soon drowned out by the shrieking howls of the rapidly approaching Watchers.
Should they risk letting him in?
This is just one of several really good suspense scenes in the lost-in-the-woods thriller The Watchers, which marks the directorial debut of Ishana Shyamalan, daughter of M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense). Ishana also wrote the script, which is based on the book of the same name by A.M. Shine.
The movie starts out well with an intriguing mystery, restrictive rules and compelling iconography (especially the “Point of no return” signs), all set in an immersive, eerie environment. Unfortunately, the story fails to capitalize on its strong premise by relying too heavily on horror movie gimmicks, which really aren’t that scary.
In addition to mimicking other horror films, The Watchers infuses a heavy quotation of The Time Machine (1960) into its narrative. In that film, based on H.G. Wells’ seminal sci-fi tale, the surface-dwelling Eloi must retreat indoors before dark or risk being eaten by the cave-dwelling Morlocks. In The Watchers, the titular creatures live deep underground and access the surface through large burrows in the ground. Similarly, in The Time Machine, characters access Morlock caves by entering cone-like openings on the surface and climbing down a long ladder. Not exactly the same, but close enough for the sake of comparison.
The whole bit with delivering the bird, the scenes where flocks of birds fly overhead, and the action beat where a bird dive-bombs one of Mina’s friends, are all reminiscent of the gags used in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Also, there’s an allusion to the hatch in Lost, but I’m not going down that rabbit hole.
To its detriment, the movie is riddled with nitpicks and plot holes. Spoilers: for instance, what happens to all the cars left behind by those who get lost in the woods? Does the forest just swallow them up (that seems to be the case with Mina’s car)? Also, during their many months spent in confinement, no one thought to look under the rug; and it’s only when the Watchers are banging down the door that they discover the hatch? C’mon! And would you really trust a pet store parakeet to guide you through the woods to a lake? Grade A ridiculousness. And then there’s the most egregious plot blunder; Madeline should’ve insisted on being the one to collect the documents from the professor’s office since she previously had a relationship with him. Though Mina learning about the origins of the Watchers helps keep the audience up to speed, it reveals the truth the Watchers have kept secret for centuries. Shoddy plotting.
Another downside is that the third act keeps stringing us along but never delivers the “Aha!” moment we’ve been anticipating since the start of the film. Perhaps Ishana was leery of employing a climactic twist since that story device proved to be such a fickle feature of her father’s films. Probably a wise precaution since a poorly-executed surprise ending could’ve tanked an already middling movie.
On the plus side, Ishana makes the most of her locations; the film was shot entirely in Ireland. It isn’t much of a stretch to say the creepy forest serves as an additional character in the film. In a very real sense, the hair-raising atmosphere is more dynamic than many of the characters, which have all the charm of the terrified trees that shiver each time a Watcher crawls past them in the dead of night.
But enough about the movie’s production elements. Let’s take a look at the film’s socio-political aspects...
Before I saw The Watchers, I jotted down some general thoughts about the movie’s most striking image: four people trapped inside a glass-walled room surrounded by a foreboding forest at night.
Symbolically, the image may represent our…
- Fear of the surveillance state. Pervasive paranoia from always being watched. The government listening in on our phone conversations—the Patriot Act. TVs Person of Interest.
- Fear of the weaponization of governmental agencies. People jailed over the Jan. 6th riot, some of whom weren’t even in D.C. that day. The IRS targeting conservative groups (Lois Lerner). FBI labeling parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists” and targeting “radical-traditionalist Catholics.”
- Fear of the loss of personal privacy. Identity theft. Prevalence of social media…everything we post is searchable. We can be cancelled for what we say/believe. May make us feel like we’re living in a glass house…like animals in a zoo.
- Fear of another lockdown. People trapped inside their homes. Loss of the freedom to go about their normal daily lives. Physically shut off from other people.
Of all the potential plot points listed above, the movie only addresses the “animals in a zoo” element (one character thinks the whole thing is a test, that the Watchers are observing them to see “what can drive a person mad”). It’s a shame that the movie chooses hokey pseudo-mythology over cultural relevance; signs and symbols (the blatantly obvious analogy of the bird in the cage and the four people inside the bunker) over substance. Any meaning derived from the movie is done so by accident rather than by design (i.e., is Mina’s apartment number “2B”—as in “to be or not to be”—a knowing nod at her existential crisis, or am I way ahead of the director…or just plain off my rocker?).
The movie does pose an interesting, unspoken question though, “Who watches the Watchers?” The answer is: the audience. We’re watching the Watchers watch their captives. This fascinating meta perspective underscores the notion that all film spectatorship is voyeuristic by nature. Hitchcock explored this theme from various angles in such movies as Psycho, Vertigo and Rear Window. I suppose if Ishana had to borrow from someone it might as well have been from the master of suspense (sorry pops).
In another meta level subplot, Mina and the others watch old episodes of a reality series called Lair of Love (a made-up series in the mold of Big Brother) on DVD. Lair follows a dozen people around an isolated house and focuses on their frequent romantic escapades. Unlike the TV show, there are only four people shut into the bunker in the movie and, fortunately, none of them fall in love with each other.
Indeed, there’s very little love in The Watchers (and, sadly, very little to love). By contrast, there’s a palpable, almost oppressive, feeling of evil in the film. This feeling is accompanied by many depictions of evil, like the winged skeleton made out of bones and sticks that sits atop a warning sign and the drawings/paintings of shadowy or tall, pale creatures in books or wall paintings in a professor’s office. The physical manifestations of evil in the movie are the Watchers themselves, which come in different shapes, sizes and temperaments (indeed, the movie never properly classifies the mythical beings, referring to them as fairies, changelings, winged people, and halflings—send royalty checks to the Shire, Middle Earth).
Halflings are the result of a Watcher male mating with a human female. According to the movie, in the distant past Watchers and humans lived in harmony, some more so than others, it would seem. Though this story point sounds kind of out there, it does have literary precedent: gods (most notably Zeus) mated with human women in Greek mythology, and spiritual beings mated with human women in the Bible—producing giant humans known as the Nephilim. The movie eschews a thorough explanation of Watcher/human relations in favor of the supposedly shocking revelation that halflings are living among us. Big deal! The newer Battlestar Galactica did that with Cylons, to far better effect.
The Watchers squanders solid directing and decent acting with contrived and derivative story elements including a muddled faux-mythology. Other than a few meaningful character moments and a couple good scares, the story doesn’t really accomplish anything.
In the end, it’s unfortunate that Padawan Shyamalan spent too much time thinking about the Watchers on the screen and not enough time thinking about the watchers in the theater.
Rating: 2 out of 4