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Kevin Costner, the American Western, and the American ego: Horizon is a baffling, incoherent mess. Kevin Costner making it was probably inevitable.

Horizon is a baffling, incoherent mess. Kevin Costner making it was probably inevitable.

The story he seems to be telling in Horizon is one of settler communities facing and overcoming hardships, embracing the call of the West in the 1850s and ’60s, and battling Indigenous Americans, who are themselves trying to assert their identity and maintain their way of life amid encroaching colonization. Subplots that never connect play out amid sweeping vistas and a constantly bombastic soundtrack, as though someone ran John Ford and Sergio Leone through ChatGPT and got an enthusiastic community theater troupe to fully commit to the bit. A final hasty montage appears unprompted at the end of the film — a long, confusing barrage of disjointed clips that could be an attempt to wrap up the current plot, preview the next movie, or just quickly use up all the footage they ran out of time to squeeze into this one.

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