Kevin Costner had a dream.  Four theatrical releases for an ongoing Western. As foretold in the title, a “saga.”

Well, the dream is a bit deferred. Or curtailed. Hard to say.

The first picture – Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 – clocked in at 3 hours, cost $50 million, and returned about $30 million, after which, it was quickly deposited on HBOMAX, where I caught it this weekend.

The story is ambitious. Set in the early 1860s, there are four separate threads that will converge, spanning the Montana territory to the San Pedro Valley in Arizona. There is a fair amount of exposition which is strange, given that Costner’s last two westerns (the overpraised Dances with Wolves, and the under-heralded Open Range) were downright laconic. There’s a lot of chatter, and some of it is sharp (Costner and a would-be assassin walking up to the same cabin, neither knowing the aim of the other until they reach their destination, is a master class in tension building), and some of it anachronistically wearying (can we finally let go of the noble Apache, who dresses down his violent son, “for now the white man will come and make us miserable and throw trash at our feet on a highway in the 1970s, which will make us shed a single, terrible tear”?)

Overall, it is fine, and if you like westerns, you’ll like this. You won’t love it. But you’ll like it.

Even if you don’t dig the picture, the film is shot so beautifully, you often thrill to the visuals without a sense or care as to what is going on.

But it ends just terribly. Horizon 2 is in the can and releases in November, thought likely not in theaters.  Horizon 3 is filming.  Horizon 4 – who knows, but Costner is putting on a brave face.

At the end of Horizon 1, there is a long preview of what is to come, no dialogue, just visuals, as if Costner is desperate to keep you engaged. I stopped it because it showed the intersection of characters and violent, maybe lethal encounters, threatening to ruin what may be coming.

But the gambit seemed a bit needy. Poor choice.  

One of the best westerns I’ve seen, a medium cool, richly-layered drama that begs the question: where do old gun men go to die? The answer limits a lot of what I can say about this picture, but it is anchored by world-weary Tim Blake Nelson and sauced nicely by the ever-interesting Stephen Dorff (resurrected after True Detective, Season 3).  What starts as a simple matter of competing interests and moral codes morphs into an increasingly taut mystery interwoven with a solid shoot ‘em up, one of those clusterfucks where, given the terror and adrenaline of the moment as well as the limitations of the weaponry, most people miss.

This is not the kind of vehicle you expect from the writer-director of Super Zeroes (“Two loser brothers and their simpleton roommate’s lives are forever changed when a mysterious meteor strikes their house”), but Potsy Ponciroli delivers the goods in this tale of fear of the past, secrets and loyalty.

One of the best of the year.

At 98 minutes, a Godsend. Currently on Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Showtime.

I caution you.  I’m a sucker for westerns, especially modern ones, because they are so few and far between. The last good one was Open Range, and that was 15 years ago (I don’t consider the brilliant The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to be a traditional western, but you have to go back to 2007 for that one, and the Coen Brothers True Grit from 2011 is a remake, so, it is also exempted).

I also concede that this film is a bit heavy on allegory and peace pipe mumbo-jumbo.  That said, I loved it.  Set in 1892, Christian Bale plays an embittered officer tasked with transporting an Indian chief (Wes Studi) and his family from New Mexico to Montana.  It is a laborious task made even more so to Bale because a decade earlier, Studi massacred Bale’s men, much as Bale massacred many an Indian.  During their trek, they come across a brutalized, in-shock Rosamund Pike, a frontier woman who lost everything to marauding Apache.  Along with a dozen other supporting characters, the group makes it way through the forbidding and harsh land, and God help me for writing these words, but in the doing, they come to an understanding about each other and their past deeds.  Written and directed by hit-or-miss Scott Cooper (Black Mass, Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace), this is a sprawling, expertly shot picture with a heavy dose of melancholy and a serene, mystical side that evokes Terence Malick (in a good way).  Several scenes were deeply affecting, and the acting is committed and mature.

I couldn’t get enough and will gladly suffer the slings and arrows of my position, because you damned cynics ruin everything.

Almost everything wrong with modern cinema is exhibited in the first five minutes of this 2016 loose remake of the John Sturges classic. The bad guy (Peter Sarsgaard) arrives to plague a town, the surrounding land of which he needs to rape, er, mine.  He tortures a child, burns a church, shoots an unarmed man in front of his wife, and then, one of his men throws an axe into the back of a fleeing woman churchgoer.

That’s what the filmmakers believe is necessary for you to give a shit.

It ain’t nearly enough.

It’s an execrable film.  The score is excessive and deafening. The western garb is better suited to a Manhattan runway. The heroes escape no demons, and no one ever misses a shot.  Everyone is twirling a gun or a knife or a mustache. Marvel movies have more depth and gravitas. Video games carry greater danger.

Worse, the film is plotted by a moron. In a seminal scene, Chris Pratt (aka, Billy Rocks, I shit you not) takes all of the money from a poker table, yet within 15 minutes, he miraculously does not have the five dollars to buy back his own horse. Thus, he is enticed by Denzel Washington to save the town!

Speaking of Pratt, he is fundamentally, constitutionally unserious and insubstantial. He’s perfect for light, wiseacre comedy. He can’t do much else, and when he tries the hard stare, Lord, is it painful.

Five more dummies sign up for the suicide mission because, well, just because. I suppose some inducement comes in the form of a frontier gal whose husband was shot in front of her. Her pitiful story serves to secure Washington‘s agreement to save the town. Or maybe it was her cleavage, which seems discordant to her “I am just a simple farm woman” mien.

Come on.

After Washington and Pratt, we get syrupy Southerner Ethan Hawke (hand to God, his name is Goodnight Robicheaux, and he had “23 confirmed kills at Antietam” – ha ha ha ha ha, you can’t make this dreck up); Vincent D’Onofrio (who comes off like Steinbeck’s Lenny had Lenny become a bounty hunter); the inevitable Indian (Martin Sensmeier as Red Harvest, who is mystical, perfectly painted and manicured, and accompanied by his own tom-tom score); and two other total nobodies, all of whom join up for similarly unexplained reasons.

Red Harvest is the easiest touch.  Washington tells him, “we go to fight wicked men.  Probably we all die” and Red Harvest is in.  Washington did bring the gal with the ample bosom to this recruitment meeting, so maybe that did the trick. It is all I can figure.

Before signing on in cement, Red Harvest (which upon reflection sounds like a maize-based cereal rather than a fearsome warrior) does cut the heart out of a deer and makes Washington eat it. Later, Red Harvest kills a bad guy Indian, to whom he says, “You’re a disgrace.”

All to the tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom-tom score.  Just in case we forgot Red Harvest was an Indian.

Of course, we learn in the end that Washington has a personal score to settle.  Turns out Sarsgaard had men rape and murder Washington’s  homesteader mother and sisters.

Which makes the recruitment effort by the buxom farm woman superfluous, as Washington should have been spending his every waking moment hunting Sarsgaard sintead of playing coy.

He needed to be talked into this?

The whole flick is a violation.

Director-writer John Maclean has crafted a hypnotic fable, an ingenious tweak on the western that bundles the innocence of Wes Anderson, the sly cynicism of the Coen Brothers, and the quiet, stunning visuals of Terence Malick. Maclean has us follow a Scottish naif (Kodi Smit-McPhee, presenting more Australian than Scottish, but no matter) as he travels through the Colorado territory, clueless and not long for the world until he is taken under the wing of an experienced gunman (Michael Fassbender). Smit-McPhee is on a quest to find his true love and Fassbender is in it for the cash, but as they wend their way through an expanse that is vast, surreal and sporadically lethal, they develop a bond that seals their fates. The cinematography is stunning, and Maclean’s confidence and patience are all the more impressive given this is his first feature. There are times you feel the scene has near been painted, until Maclean shatters it with violence. I was surprised to see many critics hail the picture as a revisionist western or an action film. It dabbles a little in both, but the heart of the picture is in the dreamy world of child’s myth and unrequited love. This is a beautiful, patient picture, to be watched on a large screen with no interruption. Available on Amazon Prime streaming.