The partisanship and gaslighting behind Horizon
Kevin Costner’s $100 million, three-hour Western Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One has flopped. Yet there are parallel ventures on the Fox Nation subscription service — Who Is Kevin Costner? And Yellowstone 150 — that persist in promoting the left-leaning Hollywood actor-director as an icon to conservative media consumers.
This contradiction wouldn’t really matter if Horizon was a great movie that transcended political differences. Instead, it’s a punishingly long, TV-style Western epic that both oversimplifies and overcomplicates the history of the expansion of the North American continent. Costner plans Horizon to be a four-part extravaganza, inciting basic conflicts between Native Americans and settlers, and between settlers themselves — nailing our forebears.
Horizon collapses and convolutes a reengineered apologetic history. In the San Pedro Valley of 1859 Arizona, Costner starts with a murderous clash of whites and natives, then switches to Montana, where Lucy (Jena Malone) defends herself against toxic masculinity (restaging Costner’s Let Him Go). Afterward, we see the raising of the new township of Horizon, where the first skirmish took place, followed by a scene of tribal marauding that remixes the climax of The Birth of a Nation with the prelude of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
Next, Costner himself enters, playing Hayes Ellison, a loner-gunslinger eventually taxed with choosing ethical sides: settlers, natives, or the arrogant military? Each of the latter — embodied by Danny Huston, Michael Rooker, Sam Worthington, and Luke Wilson — is a conflicted authority figure.
This crucible reveals Costner’s true politics, the skepticism about America’s founding combined with the optimism that made both Dances with Wolves and his ecological Third World fantasy Rapa Nui into fatuous hippie visions of global conquest.
Horizon demonstrates a bizarre, intellectually lazy way of revising, during the current crisis in patriotism, what was once Hollywood’s most popular genre. Costner (co-writing with Jon Baird) rewrites our imagined past at a time when progressives have undermined not only our legal system but also the nation’s history and its significance by peddling condemnations from Howard Zinn’s socialist A People’s History of the United States, to the New York Times’s 1619 Project, to such white-guilt off-shoots as Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.
The Hollywood Reporter described Horizon as the work of a man whose “connection to the quintessential Americana genre and the rugged lands it calls home is indisputable.” That’s unjustifiable celebrity worship considering Costner’s film hasn’t a fraction of the vision and epic longing in Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.
Costner’s morally uncertain, inauthentic history comes at us just as Americans are reeling from mainstream media gaslighting, setting the foundation for future misrepresentations of history that no one can trust. Horizon lacks the mythical and psychological insights of the great Hollywood Westerns. Its skepticism is too plain, spoiled by the cynicism of Costner’s unaccountably popular Western TV series Yellowstone.
Meanwhile, Costner’s Fox Nation contract to produce what Axios called “news-adjacent” content seems to contradict his long-standing liberalism with a new RINO gambit. And Costner’s off-screen political antics have made Horizon unreliable, given his recent endorsement of the least credible Democrat politicians, including Pete Buttigieg in his 2020 presidential campaign and Liz Cheney for her role in the J6 show trial.
For those put off by Costner’s partisanship, Horizon seems just another elaborate political distraction. Costner can’t get away with this by calling his faux-Americana a “saga.” And Western-genre fans don’t have to accept it. (Despite those sports movies from Bull Durham and Field of Dreams to Tin Cup that made Costner seem an average, nonpartisan all-American.) There is no heroism in his long-form narrative, just demoralization. Horizon may seem traditional, conventional, maybe even patriotic, yet its dull folly deadens excitement and enthusiasm about how the United States of America developed.
This period movie makes a different statement than Costner’s contemporary-set films do. Swing State (2008), Black and White (2014), and Hidden Figures (2016) were wish-fulfillment liberalism at its nicest, whereas he revealed a slightly nihilistic strain in the serial-killer film Mr. Brooks (2007) and the prescient deep-state thriller 3 Days to Kill (2014). Worst of all, Costner cheapened his stalwart father-figure in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel with the Western knockoff Let Him Go (2020). Why Costner is ambivalent about a history he has spent much of his career exploiting is a question for conservatives and Fox Nation viewers to ask themselves.