Possibly the first western film we’ve covered on the podcast, and who better than to guide us into the genre than Kevin Costner, with his latest ambitious multi-part movie project? We give a quick rundown of Costner’s acting and directorial efforts, and our experiences with the western genre before we kick our spurs and discuss the movie at length – which is mostly what we enjoyed about the film.
* Spoilers for this movie are contained within – audio warning contained in episode. *
Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (2024)
directed by: Kevin Costner
starring: Kevin Costner – Sienna Miller – Sam Worthington – Jena Malone – Owen Crow Shoe
genres: western
runtime: 181 minutes
Transcript (via Apple)
*not 100% accurate
Hi there, welcome back to The Reel Film Chronicles podcast.
As always, I’m Nathan.
And I’m Brian.
And in this week’s very exciting episode, we’re gonna be talking about a little film called Horizon, An American Saga, Chapter 1.
That is a mouthful right there.
And it is a very exciting episode, because this is an exciting episode of a movie history that we undertook in watching.
At the local theater, mind you, we both went out and saw this, because I think by the time you listen to this at home, this movie will be released digitally on July 16th.
Yeah.
Serving as another example of a very quick turnaround time.
June 28th, it came out in theaters, and July 16th, it’s gonna get a digital release.
Kevin Costner, obviously directing an American Saga, like this is a big undertaking for him.
I think he took a bunch of his own money to fund this film too.
You were pretty excited for this movie, as I recall, as I tried to get a sense of a tone out of some of your text messages going to see this.
You check this out.
Oh, we should probably give like a spoiler warning beforehand, eh?
We’re gonna be talking about spoilers from here on out.
Hashtag spoilers.
Yeah.
You’ve been warned.
So go watch the movie or not, but listen on afterwards.
How excited were you for Horizon, Chapter 1?
Listen, on a scale from zero to the birth of my two children, this is way past the birth of children.
No, children were peanuts.
No, listen, you and I grew up in the 90s.
Kevin Costner was like one of, if not the biggest star on the planet, right?
One of the biggest stars on the planet.
He was just in everything.
He could do anything, be in anything.
So I grew up watching stuff like Dances with Wolves, Feel of Dreams, a bunch of stuff.
Kevin Costner, huge.
Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, obviously, was one of my favorites.
I know it’s kind of controversial, or maybe it’s not everybody’s favorite pick.
Waterworld, another controversial one, I love it.
Love Kevin Costner.
And Kevin Costner, for a long time, I can’t remember when it started, but he seems to be really, really, I don’t want to say obsessed, but really, really invested in the Western genre.
And he’s done some really cool Western stuff before.
He obviously did, I don’t know, Dances with Wolves, he considered a pure Western, but he did Wyatt Earp, another one back in the early 2000s or 2010s, Open Range.
And I think the idea for Horizon, he was talking about this in interviews, goes back 20-some years where he was like, he had this idea and he didn’t have the resources and the money and nobody wanted to put enough money behind it to really bring this vision to life.
So it’s been a passion project of his on the back burner for a while.
And Kevin Costner is a great actor, in my opinion.
He’s a great director, an accomplished director, obviously an Academy Award winning director.
What did he win an Academy Award for?
That was Dances with Wolves, right?
I think he won for director, right?
Okay, perfect.
If I’m not mistaken.
I’m kind of going to back this up.
Honestly, I don’t know.
I didn’t look it up.
I have no idea.
It says he’s received two Academy Awards, probably one for acting as well.
Yeah, and I was super stoked for this because here was somebody, big name actor, accomplished actor and director at this passion project.
And it was in a genre that obviously the Western was huge back in the 40s, 50s, 60s.
Western was like, it was dominance.
And it’s still been in the background, obviously.
You look at things like Wyatt Earp in Tombstone, Unforgiven, the assassination of Jesse James.
Western’s genre is not going to die, but it’s kind of fallen to the back burner.
You’ll see Western elements, like you can pull in something like the Batman.
You see the Western tropes pulled into other genres now.
But I was totally stoked having seen Open Range going into it.
I was like, I don’t know about this.
I didn’t hear a lot of reviews about that back in the day.
It wasn’t a big buzz, and Open Range was a great, great movie.
If you haven’t seen Open Range, check that out.
It was Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall in that one.
Again, another passion project by Kevin Costner.
And then to see, I haven’t seen Yellowstone yet, which was a TV show, kind of almost like a modern Western, right?
It was kind of playing in that same kind of arena.
Yeah, it was almost like a testing ground almost to get, it was almost like Kevin Costner kind of rebuilding his brand with a modern audience to be able to serve as like a launching point.
It was almost like him playing the long game with Yellowstone.
I don’t know in the news, I don’t know how true it is, but I heard there was some contention with the way he left Yellowstone and kind of it was a sudden departure just at the timing with making Horizon didn’t quite work out with the production schedule on the TV show.
And then to hear that also is like there’s a legend that’s already growing about the Horizon movie where it’s like it got so big where he’s like, I need to make this, it’s going to be four chapters.
It’s not just like, I’m going to make this into four movies and he filmed, he’s already filmed the first two and they were scheduled to come out originally in June and August of this year.
I know the August one now has gotten pushed back because of the spoilers again is like the box office reception to this one wasn’t that great.
It was a gamble and Kevin Costner knew that everyone knew that.
But I feel like when people say they don’t make them like this anymore, Horizon is exactly the kind of movie that they’re talking about, right?
Sorry, Brian, you were going to say something and I was in the middle of my diatribe.
There’s a bunch of things to add into this conversation already.
One the Yellowstone thing, I’ve never watched Yellowstone.
I think I actually may have seen one episode.
I have to know.
In every context, I didn’t know what was going on.
I thought it was silly.
But then there were, I think, two prequel series, which I don’t know if he was involved in or he was actually in like 1887 or something.
Harrison Ford is in there.
And as someone who’s on the outside, my interpretation of it was that was becoming popular, Kevin Costner was involved, and then something happened and he just went all in on Horizon.
But doing that work on Yellowstone, I think, enabled him to continue on with this.
Two, I think it was 1988, I saw where he was first doing, like he first got the option of rights for Horizon or something.
After Open Range, he apparently approached Disney to try and get Horizon made, and then fast forward literally 20 years, which is crazy.
Here we are with Horizon, basically part one and two, because as you said, the second one is already filmed.
It was originally slated for a mid August release, and due to the poor box office of the first part, all the headlines say it’s been pulled, but if you read the articles, it’s pulled from theaters from that date, leaving the door open to be in theaters later on.
But I was actually kind of upset about that, because after watching this movie, I got…
Hear that?
You made Brian upset all the way.
He made me upset, right?
How can you sleep at night?
This doesn’t happen often.
I got an email from my theater saying, hey, if you book your tickets now to go see part two, we’re going to give you all sorts of extra points to go see it.
And there was enough points that it equals a free movie ticket.
Because I use points to go watch this.
It was a Saturday afternoon.
They’re building up.
And then they’re going to give me another bunch of points to go see the second one, which I would go see anyways.
Yeah, I was really excited.
And to see that news, crushed.
I couldn’t sleep for two days straight.
Well, I was crushed because I thought, oh, this is so cool.
Because we had to see one and two back to back almost.
Practically.
It was such a cool idea.
Something I hadn’t seen done before.
It was like, you had these two sequels.
Because I think even the Matrix sequels, they were released the same year.
But it was like.
There was like six or eight months between them, I think.
It was a huge span.
Like to release two.
I’m assuming the second one would have been around the three hour mark like this one was.
This giant epic Western’s kind of back to back in theaters.
What a cool thing that would have been.
It’s kind of a bummer that people are always.
Not necessarily that Horizon is going to be for everyone.
It absolutely isn’t.
But people are, you constantly see complaints about it.
It’s like, oh, there’s no original stories.
Everything’s from franchises.
Everything’s sequels.
And then when an original idea does come out, a passion project from an incredible talent.
And then the reaction of audiences is like, meh.
Yeah, right.
Well, then it’s like, well, at the same time, well, you can’t reasonably complain that you’re not getting original stuff when original stuff drops and no one goes to give it a chance.
Even studios, we talked about this as well.
I don’t know if it was in the podcast or one of our preambles as we get warmed up.
Movies these days, they’re just not given the opportunity to have those legs, to get that word of mouth out, right?
It’s like, oh, it didn’t do well.
We’re just going to pull it immediately.
If it didn’t do well in that opening weekend, pull it immediately and send it to streaming as opposed to, let it cook, let it simmer, let word of mouth spread a little bit and see if it can build up that reputation and build up some legs.
For now, it’s like the studios are getting so risk averse.
There’s like, oh, it didn’t break every box office record in the first two weeks.
Like, oh no, it’s a failure.
Pull it.
Yeah, it’s a situation at the box office now.
We’re definitely at a different landscape and it’s difficult to navigate.
I wanted to reverse the clock here a little bit and just shout out a few more Kevin Costner films here because it might be good in context.
He’s no stranger to Westerns and it seems like he’s one of the few baby-keeping Westerns alive.
As you said, Westerns dominated Hollywood for a long time, for decades.
That was almost 60, 70 years ago now.
And Westerns, almost few and far between, you’ve always seen their elements in a lot of our popular movies now.
It’s always kind of interesting when a new Western comes out.
And I think even growing up in the 90s, we’re talking about Tombstone, I think, for me at least, was maybe the most prominent Western that was our Western of our generation.
Oh yeah, that and Unforgiven, I think.
Those two, I remember.
Yes.
And again, probably growing up in that generation, that’s why they’re probably two of my favorites, because they came out at the right time.
Also, going back, just to show that I’m not, all about the newer stuff.
I love butch casting, Sundance Kid, and I love some of the older Westerns too, but just like, yeah, just the growing up tombstone and Unforgiven just came out at the right time, right?
It’s like, yeah, those are the big Westerns during the 90s, right?
So as an actor, Kevin Costner goes back, and we’re going back in time here to The Untouchables in 1987.
Bill Durham, Field of Dreams, we got a couple of baseball, like he loves baseball too, which is, I mean, what’s more American here, like the classic American Westerns and baseball?
There was another baseball movie he did too, right?
For Love of the Game, I think it was called.
For Love of the Game?
Yeah.
I see another poster here called Chasing Dreams, and he’s in front of a baseball diamond, which is right after Field of Dreams.
I don’t know if that’s like a documentary or something.
I think so, yeah.
Dances with Wolves, which he also directed.
He’d go on to do Robin Hood, JFK, The Bodyguard, Wyatt Earp, The War, Waterworld, which, oh yeah, that is a movie and a half right there.
But he directs The Postman, which, yeah, For Love of the Game comes out afterwards, after The Postman.
13 days.
Oh yeah, early 2000s, right?
3,000 miles to Graceland, then Open Range, and I feel like the 2000s, I don’t recognize a lot of the stuff.
Oh, Mr.
Brooks, he was in a horror movie, right?
Yeah, I see that listed here.
I can’t imagine Kevin Costner in a horror movie, but that was like early 2000s, so that was a long time ago.
And again, I don’t recognize a lot of the stuff coming in here.
I mean, he was in Man of Steel, right?
Paul Kent, he was in Shadow Recruit, the Chris Pine, Jack Ryan film.
Three Days to Kill, Draft Day, a football movie.
Broke away from baseball for a little bit.
And more recently, yeah, The Highwayman, or Highwayman, sorry.
Molly’s Game, Hidden Figures, Criminal.
Molly’s Game, that’s right.
He played Molly’s Game, yeah.
And as a director, he’s directed four films that have been released so far.
And we already alluded to them, The Postman, Open Range, Dances with Wolves, and now Horizon.
And he’s directed three more Horizon movies, right?
Two more, because I think one and two are done, and I think he has two more in the box, right?
As I was saying, four released movies so far, and there’s three more.
But you meant like, one is completed and two more, he still directs.
Just some antics that don’t matter, but I was kind of surprised when I looked that up.
I kind of thought he would have been directing more.
And it’s interesting, every single movie he’s directed is a Western film.
So it’s like this, I mean, it seems appropriate, right?
I guess that-
It’s his bread and butter, yeah.
It’s his bread and butter.
But I gotta talk about for a second here that I was not looking forward to Horizon, going to watch this movie.
Because you thought, well, you heard Horizon, you thought it was a Horizon Zero Dawn movie.
It’s like, who’s playing Aloy?
That was my first thought because, yeah, last year I played through Horizon Zero Dawn.
You’re just running down like all the redheaded actresses in Hollywood of the right age to play Aloy.
Who could be in this?
Yeah.
And then when you change it on the-
This is fantastic.
There’s no way to come back from that.
But honestly, I have to admit to you, I’ve never seen Open Range, I’ve never seen The Postman, and I have never seen Dances with Wolves.
Okay?
You’ve never seen Dances-
Oh my God.
That was one of my favorite movies growing up.
It’s still a favorite of mine, but that was, if you would have asked me back in the 90s what my top movies would have been, like Dances with Wolves would have been probably in the top five, right?
I did not see Unforgiven until the past five, six years.
I kind of missed out-
You mean Wyatt Earp?
Wyatt Earp I have not seen.
Yeah.
Well, Unforgiven wasn’t his.
That was Clint Eastwood.
Yeah, it wasn’t his, but I know Unforgiven is an iconic Western from our time you mentioned earlier.
And you haven’t seen them yet?
I’ve seen that one, but only recently.
And I haven’t seen Wyatt Earp.
I haven’t seen a lot of Western films, but a few years ago, you and I, after doing one of our Halloween horror months, were like, all right, what should we tackle next?
And we were like, I think you suggested Westerns.
It’s like, great.
I must have watched a dozen Westerns that month and really going back in time and catching it up, but I’m still far behind all these ones because a lot of these Westerns here, especially when Costner’s involved, are like three plus hours long.
When he goes, he goes big.
Right?
It’s like with Costner and Western, it’s like it’s all or nothing, baby.
And I wanted to read this one quote I saw.
I lifted this for Wikipedia.
It’s a…
A trusted news source.
They call it Mixed Review from Esquire from Owen Gleiberman.
Oh, Owen Gleiberman of Variety, sorry.
It says, Yet I think the idea is that the design of it all will come into focus as we see Horizon Chapter 2 and at some point Chapter 3, if all goes according to plan.
I seriously hope not.
I’m not sure how much juice there is to squeeze out of these characters, but even if there is some, I don’t want to see movies turn into television.
Just about every Western of the studio era came in at two hours or less, and so did most of the revisionist Westerns, and some of those were complicated.
There’s a reason for that.
It’s all the time they needed.
So it’s really coming out against long Westerns as being like…
Yeah, and this is part of the dialogue I’ve seen.
I think maybe it’s part of the shift in how people are engaging with text now and how technology and media are changing people’s engagement.
Because I’ve seen so many people come out on Reddit or other online threads and different review threads.
It’s like, oh, Horizon should have been like a mini series.
It should have been on a TV show, it should have been a TV show and it’s like, I think, first of all, I 100% disagree.
I don’t think everything needs to be a limited series or TV show, but it shows how we’re engaging with text now and how we’re engaging with these stories.
People want something more episodic that they can take, they want stories that they can take in bite-sized chunks, play on Netflix or Amazon in the background, or it’s like, I have half an hour or an hour after work, I can just watch little bits, little chunks at a time.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but for me, I don’t know, this whole dialogue about, oh, it should have been a mini-series, it should have been a limited series, I guess, the parlance at the time, or it should have been a TV show, I think is missing the point.
And I think it’s speaking more to a shift in how people are wanting to engage in stories in general, not specifically Westerns, because absolutely, you know, I think movies and TV, you tell the same story in each of those different media, and it’s just like each of those different media has pros and cons, right, like, there’s something epic about a movie in terms of pacing, in terms of production, that you just, you can’t get that same sense of epicness in a TV show, right?
TV shows are good if you want to, you know, they have other strengths, right?
But for me, something like this, this Horizon was so operatic, right?
As in like an opera, right?
It was so grand in scale and scope and ambition.
And some of those shots in the movie were just, it would switch to just the landscape shots.
It was just absolutely breathtaking.
And the whole movie felt epic and it felt epic specifically because it was in the medium, it was that story was told in that specific medium, right?
And to break that up into bite size chunks, you’re going to gain some things, right?
But you’re going to lose, and that to me, even something like Star Wars, right?
Star Wars to me, it feels like an epic story.
It feels like it’s on the big screen.
That’s why I’ve had so much trouble, I think, maybe engaging in some of the Star Wars shows, which some of them are not terrible shows.
But for me, Star Wars feels like it’s an epic event on the big screen.
And that’s to me, Horizon, it felt like you put on the big screen or even like your big, your small screen at home afterwards, but you put it in that medium and that format and that there’s a certain pacing and there’s a certain storytelling structure to movies different than TV that you just, it loses something when you in translation, right?
So I 100% disagree with it.
And I love to see this epic story unfold on the big screen in multiple chapters.
I would agree and disagree with what you’re saying.
I think the way we interact with our content is changing.
And I think the content itself is changing too.
In my mind, there’s a bit of a bias where we really do come from that era of TV that TV is lower budgets, a lesser film.
Like if a movie star went in, this is as recent as the 90s, the movie star went into a TV show, like they may not be able to break back into movies.
And now the line is becoming blurred because the budgets and the cinematography and stuff are there in a lot of TV shows.
Now, I’m not fully disagreeing here, so I have issues watching TV in this new format where they pour a lot of money into it, right?
And they can look amazing.
They look just as amazing as these epic movies we’re watching.
But we’re watching these epic movies on our small screens now because they can’t support, they can’t play them in these movies for in the theaters long enough, which is a crime upon itself.
And I find what the big difference now is that I keep saying this, movies are really efficient at telling their stories.
And they have like 90 minutes to three hours, four hours to tell that story.
A TV show, once it’s in that limited series format, I’ll watch a show that’s eight episodes long, it might be eight hours in total, and in my mind about five or six of those hours could easily be cut out.
And I know there’s a big argument for a TV series to be like, you get a lot more character development.
Then I think, well, in movies, we get some incredible characters, but they have to be told in a more efficient manner to develop those characters, right?
So for me, movies are my preferred format over TV, but that’s not to say TV is garbage or anything, there’s a lot of really awesome TV.
I think when people say that this Horizon should have been a TV series or something, it’s like maybe they’re looking at it like it’s already in four chapters, like it’s a four-part series, and you could break those further down into one-hour chunks.
Honestly, I could see that when I’m watching this movie, and I’m also going in, and somebody told me that part 1 felt like three TV episodes put together.
When I’m watching the movie, I didn’t get that sense that there were three episodes mashed together, but I did feel like it was one part of a multi-part series, which I get that same feeling when I watch the first episode of a TV series.
In my mind, this is a bigger undertaking, but it felt the same way to me as I’m watching these TV shows, except I’m sitting there watching it in the theater.
Right.
But the same argument can be leveled against the Star Wars movies, because most Star Wars movies, aside from The New Hope, really were episodic, right?
It’s always like cliffhanger endings, right?
And especially Empire Strikes Back, most people’s favorite movie was purely episodic, right?
It was building on the last story and it never end.
So to me, that argument doesn’t break down.
And to me, the idea…
When I was talking about the difference between TV and movie, I’m not talking about the old model TV.
Obviously, the budgets on TV…
You look at things like, obviously, Game of Thrones and the new House of the Dragon and stuff.
Yeah, they got amazing budgets to play with.
You can make things look just as good as a cinema.
But there’s something about you take a three-hour movie versus three one-hour TV episodes, and there’s a different pacing and a different story structure you follow.
You tell the same story, but breaking this down…
People keep saying, oh, it should have been a miniseries, but you take that same story and you break it down, and you have to restructure it slightly.
There’s a different pacing, there’s a different structure.
To me, that’s what takes away from the epic feel of the movie.
There’s something about…
I don’t have enough vocabulary right now to articulate it, but there’s something about the narrative structure in a movie format, when it’s meant to be told as a story like that, in whatever time it is.
If you break it down to smaller chunks, you have to change it around, and you gain probably depth of character development and things like that, but you lose that sense of epic storytelling.
It’s a trade-off, right?
And I think, in my mind, watching Horizon on the big screen, as a movie, that story demanded that specific medium.
I don’t think it could have been told in a TV show format, right?
Yeah, and I’m not gonna argue, because I think we’re probably arguing two different things when we’re talking about the movies and TV thing, but I will disagree that this needed to be told in the theatrical format.
I didn’t feel like I was getting that epicness.
In fact, I think it was maybe like, Costner was going too ambitious with this, with too little story, and too little underdeveloped characters.
I just wanted to throw that out there.
No, man, I wholeheartedly disagree.
Like, and I think the quote I gave earlier, when he’s saying the greatest Western films were all like maximum two hours long, they were two hours long, probably forced them to condense into like a nice cohesive thing.
Now we have this environment where maybe Costner, I know he’s, the budget of this movie is $50 million.
Apparently, which I don’t know how confirmed it is, he threw in $38 million of his own money for that.
So it’s like for a studio-
Probably like he mortgaged his own house or property or whatever to do this, yeah.
Yeah, $38 million or something.
So it’s like, I think he has full creative like control over this.
And it seemed to, I don’t know, maybe get a little too away from him.
Well, I think that’s a, it’s always been a facetious argument to me, right?
It’s like, I think a movie, people talking about, oh, movie’s too short or it’s too long.
It’s like, no, a movie is exactly as long as it needs to be to tell the story you’re trying to tell.
Yes, it should.
So when people say it’s like, oh, we shouldn’t have three hour movies or three hour Westerns or-
Yeah, yeah.
And I’m not trying to argue-
Yeah, no, no, no, no, you’re quoting somebody else.
But to me, that’s always been a facetious argument.
It’s like, no, some of the great Westerns you see, it was like, they were longer than two hours.
I think even the sample you mentioned, I’m pretty sure Tombstone was longer than two hours.
Probably.
I think he’s specifically referring to the studio day as 40s, 50s, and 60s of Western movies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, recently I watched, I want to call it the Dollars trilogy, Clint Eastwood, Good, Bad, The Ugly.
The first two movies are like 90 minutes long, and then the third one is like three and a half hours long.
And I’m like, it was my second time watching that movie, but it had been like 25 years.
So after watching them, like an actual release order, I was like, man, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly was way too long for its own good.
I do believe that.
It’s like the other two movies just seem to be like a lot more effective at telling their stories in the appropriate amount of time.
That might be a hot take.
It goes on like a movie by movie basis though.
It’s about the context of that specific story and that specific movie, right?
So it’s like, yeah, absolutely.
Are there some movies that I think could have been, could have lost like an hour and still been just as good or better?
Yeah, a hundred percent.
Are there some movies that day?
Oh yeah, it was too rushed.
It could have been longer.
Absolutely, the other thing I want, sorry, go ahead.
No, no, I was arguing in this specific case, my point of view, it was exactly the right medium and it left me wanting more as he was evidently trying to do, right?
With his multi-part series.
So the other thing I want to mention is that we got kind of burned by a few movies recently that were like part ones of multiple, including the, I think Fast X was part one of two and that movie was like two and a half hours long.
And you’re like, man, this is, like that was too much of a part.
But here it’s very upfront.
It’s like, it doesn’t hide the Chapter 1.
You know it’s a Chapter 2 is already, if you look at the release calendar, it was like literally one month later, you didn’t expect to see Chapter 2.
So you know what you’re getting into when you go to the movies, which I think could possibly hurt the box office here for it because to have someone, people, I mean, I think it’s a fact that people are adverse to long movies and theaters for whatever reason.
So for them to say, I have to sit down for six hours in the theater to get the first two parts, and then maybe another six hours next year, was like, maybe people have like a mental block of like, that’s too much time to sit down and watch this particular story.
So maybe Costner doesn’t quite sell it.
And this is the other part where I don’t know like how much involvement he has in Yellowstone.
I know Yellowstone was like big, everyone was watching this, but I’m not, I’m out of the loop on that so I don’t have the perspective to be like, does he have a lot of goodwill coming from that TV show?
To be like, all right, now I’m gonna go do a 12-hour Western film told in four parts.
Well, I think that’s part of his kind of business side.
He’s been in the industry a long time, obviously, and Yellowstone was kind of a resurgence where like he was a new generation that hadn’t, like they were getting introduced to Kevin Costner, I think for the first time.
And so he’s like, he probably thought, it’s like probably rightfully so.
It was like, okay, all of a sudden it’s like I got people our age who know him.
It was like Kevin Costner’s in the movie.
It was like, I’m gonna pay attention more.
And I got another next generation Yellowstone folks.
There it was like, oh, I know this guy from Yellowstone is making a Western movie.
It was like probably like, it was like, was banking on he gambled and it was, it turned out to be, it turned out to go against him.
But like to your point, you’re absolutely right.
I think having them back to back for me, someone like me, I’m down.
Yeah, right.
I’m DTW.
I’m down to watch.
Like I’ll watch them back to back because I love Westerns and I love Kevin Costner.
And this is part of my own narrative.
Sorry, keep going.
No, no, no, you’re absolutely right.
I think for most people in a modern movie market, like look at the investment of time is like, I got to watch six hours of stuff in a theater just to get the first half of the story.
It’s like, yeah, of course.
Of course, that’s going to be a very narrow market of people you’re selling to.
People love Kevin Costner, love Westerns, and love sitting in theaters instead of going outside to play.
And I was just going to say, this is for my own narrative.
For this particular podcast episode and watching this movie, going in with the perspective of never actually seeing a Costner-directed movie at all, even many of the Westerns he’s been in, is I was really hesitant to go in.
I watched all three hours, and there’s a montage, like highlight reel of the next two or three parts at the end of the movie.
And as I mentioned earlier, I was ready to buy my ticket, and I had further incentive to do that.
And I was into it.
The movie turned me around.
Like, I know I’ve probably been kind of negative on it beginning, but I was super negative coming in.
I wanted to hate this movie when I first went to the theater to see it.
That’s aggressive.
I mean, not hate, hate.
I don’t want to say hate, but I…
I had a lot of hate, and I need some targets.
And I came out, I’m like, damn, that was good.
I love going to movies, and I can’t deny it.
It’s like, I love seeing the beautiful country, the beautiful cinematography.
Like, it’s top notch.
I love seeing it on the big screen, and there’s definitely something to be said for that.
The movie turned me around, and I’m excited for more of them.
Okay, that montage at the end of like scenes of the next movie, just kind of like, I want every movie now to do this.
That should be at the end.
Any movie that’s gonna plan on making a sequel, Marvel, take notes.
I want a bunch of scenes to the next episode tacked on at the end.
That was great.
I was like, what is that?
Are they just gonna like speed run through the next 10 years of these characters lives?
Like, no, it’s like a teaser for the next movie.
It’s like, oh my God, Jena Von Robici just shows up at the end.
He’s like third build in the movie or something.
He shows up in like the last two minutes.
Amazing.
And I was reading stuff from Costner, like he may be in the second one, but he’s more of like the central character in the third or fourth entries.
It’s like he’s got huge Billy this one.
But this is now the second time this year where we’ve had Furiosa with a highlight reel montage of the next movie in that case, Fury came out way before, but.
It’s already happening.
It’s already happening.
So it’s like.
I love it.
It’s seen across the Spider-Verse.
And at the end of that, we get like a mini trailer of.
I don’t want to call it a trailer.
The montage reel of the third entry.
I think the highlight reel.
The highlight reel.
It’s just like, maybe we’ll get more of this going on.
Cause I left the theater.
I was excited.
I was just like, yeah, let’s go buy this.
Take it right now.
Yeah, a hundred percent, a hundred percent.
But you were talking about like the cinematography was great.
You know, I think you look at the history of the Westerns, specifically that Kevin Costner’s directed, and there’s a lot more, I think, maturity in the narrative in terms of how it treats, you know, this is set, I think, during the Civil War, with the Civil War serving more like a backdrop or something happening farther away, and you’re kind of feeling repercussions of that.
But you look at the relationship between obviously the, you know, the colonial white people, and then the, you know, indigenous peoples.
And I think there was a lot more maturity in how he was telling that story, where we look at essentially like the history of America, you know, was built on this violence, right?
And I love those, that sense where like, in traditional, you go back to the 50s and 60s, and it’s like, yeah, the, you know, it was cowboys and Indians, and the Indians were the bad guys, and the cowboys were the good guys.
And now you look, it’s like, you know, it was expressively acknowledged, like, yeah.
Like even like the, I know there’s like, some of the dialogue probably felt for some people a bit on the nose.
When Michael Rooker and I can’t remember the other actor’s name, the general and the colonel there were having the conversation, it was like, oh yeah, people are going to keep coming west, because like the idea is if you’re mean enough, if you’re tough enough and you’re smart enough, you’ll be able to settle this land.
Even though we told them, it was like, the army was like, telling them, it was like, no, there’s indigenous people out there, it’s their land and you go out there, you’re going to get killed.
And what happens?
They go out there and they get killed.
And then there’s also a bunch of time spent with the indigenous people, go to their tribe and they shows them talking and gives context like, oh, the one people, the one dude’s like, yeah, we gotta keep encroaching our land.
We gotta fight back.
And the other guy’s like, yeah, maybe we, like you kill them, they’re gonna come back and kill us.
And then we’re gonna kill them and perpetuate the cycle of violence.
And neither, nobody’s completely right.
Nobody’s completely wrong.
Right?
It’s like, yeah, like we can’t perpetuate, we shouldn’t perpetuate cycles of violence, but we got people who are coming in and stealing our land, killing us off.
You can’t just sit by the side and like, I love that there was that nuance showing, the other side that’s so often been neglected and showing it’s not so cut and dry, right?
You have, so there’s some of that knowledge.
It’s still part of the US mythology in there.
And it’s not, I’m not saying that this is some super progressive movie that’s gonna advance, it’s gonna solve all racism the past 20 years against indigenous peoples.
But in terms of some of the other movies, the focus and the nuance in that, I thought that was super refreshing and I think probably kind of a mark of the times.
And to show those, oh yeah, these are, it’s not about good guys and bad guys, it’s about all these people’s stories interacting, the people in this circumstance, people including Luke Wilson somehow.
Who was great, by the way.
I didn’t usually see him in more comedic roles, but he was great in a serious, dramatic role.
But it’s like, yeah, it’s almost like slice of life, where you’re peeking in on these characters’ lives.
And it’s less about the judgments of the characters and more just watching lives unfold in this incredibly transformational time in North American history, and watching these people intersect and how things played out.
And yeah, it was, I was hooked kind of from beginning to end with all the multiple stories you had the…
Yeah, I just wanted to run through the storylines.
Yeah.
As I understood it.
I mean, you talked about the Apache raid on the town.
They’re trying to literally found the Horizon village.
It’s like the first guys who are surveying the land, they get killed.
There’s three burial plots.
And then, I think a couple of years go by and more people come here.
It’s just like, after the town is demolished and burned down, they come over.
It’s just like, why did you decide to do it here?
And it’s like, there’s these graves.
Whose graves are those?
They’re like, we don’t know.
It’s like, why wouldn’t you use that as a warning sign to not build here?
And it’s just like, I love that angle of the military being somewhat respectful here of the lands that they’re in.
It’s like, we have these lands.
Don’t try and go out there.
It’s like, it’s not your land, and they’re just trying to build on it.
And this guy, Giovanni Ribisi, who’s put up posters for Horizon, like selling this town that doesn’t fully exist yet as like the greatest destination in the world.
I love that the whole story of Horizon was like the story of this town being built.
But when it, like you’re saying, sorry, I’ll let you go on, but like, it reminded me, and I was kind of laughing to myself as an inside joke, but like in the sketch, there’s a sketch, or there’s a part in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
One of the characters is like talking about, it’s like, everyone told me I was an idiot to build my castle in the swamp.
I built the castle and it sank in the swamp.
I built another castle, it sank in the swamp.
I built a third castle and it burned down and sank in the swamp.
But the fourth castle, and I was like thinking, it’s like, this is the story of Horizon.
It’s true.
Try once, they killed us all.
Try it again, burned it down.
It’s like, so I was like kind of sticking to myself because it’s like something out of a Monty Python sketch.
That is 100% accurate.
So in this Horizon town, I mean, for the first hour of the movie is just like the depiction of this town being burnt down, attacked.
And a mother and her daughter survive.
And then they decide to go with the military guys who have a head on their shoulders.
They seem somewhat intelligent.
Sam Worthington, who is really good.
And so they go with them.
And like their storyline now, like this one storyline splits into two where it kind of like turns into this romance between the mother and Sam Worthington.
I can’t remember the character’s name.
And then some people in the military, but also the town who want vengeance against the Apache who did the attack and killings, right?
And so they form a posse.
And now we have two different kind of like storylines that are connected, but they’re very much like separate for the rest of the film.
And then we have Kevin Costner’s storyline where he’s kind of like this loner merchant dude.
I think he was selling horses or something.
And he’s riding up into this little town.
He plays the Clint Eastwood, silent stranger who comes in, doesn’t say much, but he’s got it where it counts, right?
And he basically gets tangled up with some local drama here with this lady who’s, I mean, is she a prostitute?
Like she’s trying to get him to stay there.
Yeah, she’s a prostitute, 100%.
She’s also from another Mad Max connection.
She was in Mad Max Fury Road.
Oh, that’s right.
Yes, yes.
I was trying to, I was like looking at her.
She’s one of those people who’s got the very unique kind of look to her, very unique face.
And I was like, I know, I’ve seen you before.
And it was in Mad Max Fury Road.
She was one of the people, like one of the wives of Morton Joe that was rescued, yeah.
And then there’s her sister, I think, with her like brother-in-law, like the two of them, that’s Jena Malone and the-
Donnie Darkrow’s girlfriend.
Yeah.
And this guy is like trying to sell this other group some land or something, they have to go.
It’s very tense.
They basically, he ends up getting killed.
I think Jena Malone’s character meets a fate that we don’t actually see.
So we don’t know by the end of the movie what actually happens to her.
Well, they wanted to take her back alive because she was the mistress of this one dude.
And then she shot him, took their baby, took their illegitimate love child and ran.
And then the dude sends his sons out after to get her.
So like there’s that whole storyline, which is great.
I’ll admit, there was a scene earlier in the movie where like with this family at their ranch vet, I saw that and I didn’t register.
I think it like almost two hours went by before they came up again.
I was like, who are these people?
What’s going on here?
I was a little confused for that, but they get tied into that.
And now the rest of the storyline for Kevin Costner is with him, this woman and the baby, like kind of on the run.
Like they’re getting out of town.
They’re trying to lay low.
And then finally, the third story, which seemed to come out of complete, like nowhere, it’s not like directly connected, the caravan of new settlers heading towards Horizon, essentially they’re heading towards the West.
So they have like that classic caravan.
You have Luke Wilson, who’s like, I think he said he’s like the unofficial captain.
He just ended up stepping into the role.
He’s trying to keep them all safe and trying to like broker peace between them.
Because you have the British couple, the artists, who I didn’t understand if they were British at first either, who were like sort of causing problems because they’re kind of like, they’re not hard workers.
They’re not, they’re, well, what would be the proper word for them?
I mean, they’re artists.
They don’t know how to fix wagon wheels and stuff, right?
Very posh, I guess.
They’re very bourgeois.
They were just like the, they were just like going west on an adventure, but didn’t realize like, no, like you’re part of the wagon train is like, no, you see somebody working, you go help them out, right?
That’s right.
And so the other part of that, which I did not know until I read the Wikipedia this morning, is that the main family in that care van is the extended family from the first storyline of the mother and daughter, her husband, that’s her husband’s family who are coming into Horizon because they were already there, right?
And so that was the connection there about which I completely missed during the movie.
It’s going to be, they’re going to be in for a shock.
I don’t know if they throw out, there’s so many names and stuff, right?
There’s so many characters, it’s just like, I’m just there for, I’m just there.
Yeah.
And things play out and there’s a whole, there’s a whole other storyline with the Apache, with the Apache, right?
They’re, like, a lot of time was spent with their people, like, they had the descent and then they have their people, like, one group is like, no, like, the kind of old, the older dude, I think he’s the chief.
And he’s like, no, we got to, like, you see the course, you know, we got to break cycles of violence.
And the other dude’s like, we’re going to fight back for our people.
And he’s like, well, anybody, I love that too, is like, anybody’s like, you’re, I’m not going to tell you what to do.
Everyone here is free to make their own decision.
If you want to go and fight, you’re absolutely free to make that decision.
One of his young sons goes with them and one of his young sons stays.
And that was a, I love that they spent so much time with that too, is like showing that side of things.
And it wasn’t just like there weren’t these one dimensional characters that the indigenous people were given, they were multifaceted and had their own motivations and everything.
Something that, you wouldn’t have necessarily seen that kind of nuance in westerns 20, 30 years ago, right?
40, 50 years ago for sure.
Without a doubt, it was wild.
The whole thing, and then the movie ends on just absolute brutality there with the Vat Posse.
They had got bloodlust.
It doesn’t matter who they’re fighting now, they just wanna go kill some people.
And they wanna get those scalps and get paid.
After a while, they’re just like, man, we’re not here for so long, looking for the people who attacked, the specific indigenous people who attacked your village.
Like, all the other people here, some of those dudes were like, they were not out there for the honor sake.
They were out there, it was like, we’re gonna make some money off of this.
And it’s like, they’re getting antsy.
It’s like, we just, we gotta do some killing, get some scalps to make some money.
And there was the one dude in the kid who kind of reluctant about it, right?
And it’s showing like they were conflicted.
So that’s the kid who heroically wrote off while the town was being attacked and got the local military help to come out the next day.
And he’s like, initially he’s out for blood too.
And I think his character will be pretty prominent as time goes on because he’s seen as like, oh, the plan is to wait until all the men and warriors of this local tribe are gone.
And then they literally go in and kill all the women and children, which is deplorable.
And this kid has seen it happen.
It’s like, you could see him roiling around with the ethics of it all, right?
Yeah, that was great.
There’s like the one scene where they were in the, they were in that little kind of that station, that shop along the way.
And the dudes are like the indigenous dudes, they’re trying to sell the antelope or trade the antelope in for supplies.
And then they start messing with them and like try to get them into a duel with this kid, start playing with them.
And then you see the one dude who can speak the Apache’s language or that specific, you know, that specific tribe’s language.
And he’s telling them like, don’t make a move.
They’re just, the kid’s not gonna draw any attention to you, they’re just playing a game.
And that scene was so tense.
It was one of the standout scenes in the movie.
Another standout scene, the favorite scene, I think, and probably rightfully so, Kevin Costner put himself in this scene on that walk up to the cabin to meet the prostitute there for dinner.
And that dude, one of the brothers who sent to bring back, you know, his dad’s mistress there, and more importantly, probably to them at that time, that extra air, right?
It’s like they care about bloodlines and airs.
And that whole conversation up to the top, that was great storytelling, great scene, probably why Kevin Costner wanted to be in that scene.
And the dude who was playing that slimy younger brother in that group, you know who played?
That dude?
Who was that?
Kevin Costner’s real life son.
Oh, really?
Yeah, so he got to be in this scene with his son and his son was chewing the scenery.
Yeah, yeah.
Something fierce to use some Western lingo.
But that scene was just great.
And it showed like that was the classic kind of, you know, stranger walks into town and doesn’t say much, walk tall and carry a big stick kind of thing.
Didn’t say much.
There’s a classic kind of Clint Eastwood character.
It comes in, you know, the man with no name.
And he played, Kevin Costner played that role.
That’s the role if he wants to play at some point.
If you’re in a Western.
You know, I really liked about this character.
Like he’s playing that role, right?
But he’s got this blue jacket on the whole time.
And it’s just like all these other Western guys, it’s like it’s the dark leather.
It’s just like he’s got this blue leather.
And I’m thinking this guy must have some money.
Like he must be good at what he does.
It’s just like he’s not afraid of like entirely Stendio because there’s not a lot of color in the West here.
Like people aren’t wearing colors.
They’re not wearing like a baby blue leather jacket or whatever it was.
I don’t think it was…
No, it wasn’t a leather jacket.
It was like a pea coat or something.
I can’t remember.
But that really stood out to me.
I’m like, is this to play off of like Kevin Costner’s blue eyes or something?
It’s just like who’s the costume designer here?
Like really what made him look sharp in this film?
Let’s get Brian Lost and Kevin Costner’s deep blue eyes.
Also, can I say that I don’t think it was special effects, maybe it was such a special effects, but like I think with the makeup and lighting, Kevin Costner looked like 20, 25 years younger.
So I think he’s in his 70s or something, and he looked like he was born in 1955.
He’s pretty much 69 years old at this point.
And yeah, he looks like he looks in pretty good shape.
I think you can do a lot with makeup and lighting and stuff.
And I think, holy cow, have we gone back in time?
He looked like he was at least 20 years younger.
Well, that’s a good point is that you do not see the special effects of this movie at all.
And I would love to see a breakdown of it.
And I think that’s a testament to how good any of the special effects would be.
Get over to the Corridor Crew YouTube page.
We need to get this in there.
Special effects breakdown, Horizon.
And you listen to me go…
Maybe that’s something too with westerns.
I watch a western from the 40s.
It looks the same as a western from the 60s.
They just nailed that look from ages ago.
And it’s like now, I just imagine all sorts of fake backgrounds and whatnot.
Maybe not though.
Maybe this is all shot on different locations that just look gorgeous with perfect lighting all the time.
There’s so many…
I mean, the movie just looked so good.
That’s the thing.
Every scene looked amazing.
Yeah, it was just like it was beautiful just to watch.
And I loved…
I loved too.
You know, and again, probably some people aren’t gonna like this.
But, you know, the transitions between the stories, there wasn’t a lot of telegraphing.
You just find yourself almost like, you know, dropped from one story into the next without a whole lot of warning.
I love that kind of thing where it felt like you were really just jumping around and just like popping in on these people is like, okay, what’s happening with them now?
And what’s happening with them?
And what’s happening with them?
Some people are not going to like that, and that’s completely understandable.
It’s a matter of taste.
That’s one of those things.
I’m not trying to poke at you here.
It’s just like to me, that felt like one of the TV qualities.
You know what I mean?
It was just like, boom, bam, we’re going to jump into the storyline.
It was definitely, it was a different kind of editing style than I think people are used to.
I really dug it.
But yeah, like those, I would just be like, I would just be in awe.
I’d be like, oh, just like a wide shot, high angle shot of the background, of like the landscape.
I’d be like, this is just so breathtakingly beautiful.
Yeah, it was just the way, all the composition, the shot, the shooting, like you say, the cinematography.
Yeah, like it was just beautiful, beautiful movie to look at.
And surprisingly, there are a lot of comedic moments in there, too.
I found myself laughing quite a bit, which is a good balance because there were a lot of poignant scenes in there.
I think this is the kind of strength of the story, because it’s really the story of this whole, of how the city came to be, right?
I think the whole idea is like all these people are going to kind of center in on Horizon eventually.
But there’s some pretty poignant scenes, especially like as a parent, some scenes between kind of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, or just parents and children, is like getting a little bit choked up.
You put yourself in those situations, right?
It’s like, yeah, this is pretty intense and pretty engaging, right?
Like in that first section when you had the town under siege, they’re kind of all holed up in…
I’m just going to look up the name quickly here.
The family is Kittredge.
So you’re holed up in the Kittredge home as a last stand.
There’s a secret underground area that the wife and the daughter are hiding in, and they want the son to go in too, but he feels a duty.
What was he, maybe 12 years old or something?
His duty is being upstairs with all the men who are defending, shooting, doing all this stuff, but he’s also acutely aware that he’s going to die up there.
If he chooses to stay up there, he’s done.
And everyone knows it, but it’s like, that is the duty you take on, like, in these roles here.
It’s pretty brutal to see them play out, and the acting is good enough that you get a sense of, like, this is really tragic.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There’s some, it runs a full gamut.
There’s some really tense scenes.
I think the whole movie, there was kind of this tension that never really broke.
It was like, oh, man, you really captured the violence inherent in that era, where I think the opening shot, it opens on an ant hill with a bunch of ants scurrying about, I think, obviously, kind of this metaphor for the American West, right?
Or really human history in general, where alien civilization comes in and looks, and we’re just a bunch of ants scrambling over a couple pieces of land.
It really kind of breaks down the fundamental themes of the movie or the fundamental themes of Westerns.
It’s like, oh, yeah, all this killing, all this bloodshed, all this going out west and this hard work and all this stuff.
And it’s like, we’re just ants rearranging, fighting over pieces of dirt at the end of the day.
Yeah.
And it’s like to reduce that down.
It’s like, oh, yeah, that’s what a simple shot, but a great shot.
Maybe some people only think it’s a little bit on the nose, but I think that’s a good thing, right?
It’s kind of even like a shot like that, simple shot to open the movie, but it contextualizes everything and really sums up and puts things in perspective, right?
Wild, just wild.
What other notes do you have to talk about with this film?
You know what?
I think Kevin Costner needs four movies, but I think we got it down in less than an hour probably.
I think a lot of good discussion here.
I don’t want to beat a dead horse to stay on the Western team here.
I think, yeah, overall, I probably could tell from my comments, I really enjoy this movie.
I went in with higher expectations, which can sometimes be detrimental.
But I really enjoyed the heck out of Horizon.
It was truly…
You don’t get the kind of experience that often in the movies.
I’m not saying every movie should be a three or three and a half hour epic.
Of course, they shouldn’t.
But in this case, man, I was just…
I was eating up every second.
And when I did that montage at the end, I was like, no, no, no, I want more right now.
And I left the theater wanting more, which is probably, you know, it’s a good following up on that that mantra in show business.
You leave him wanting more.
And Kevin Costner did just that.
So kudos to you, Mr.
Costner.
You still have a fan in me.
I’m going to show up to…
I’m still waiting on Waterworld 2.
So I’m one of the dozens who love that movie.
Cult favorite Waterworld, for sure.
Has a very nice 4K release now.
It’s got the boutique label.
Yeah, anyways.
And I came in almost the opposite.
I came in with low expectations, wanting to not like the movie, and it turned me around.
I quite enjoyed it.
I was looking forward to more, and I’m disappointed we’re going to be a bit delayed in getting that.
But I’m thinking the wait will be worth it.
And I think, honestly, at the end of the day, don’t let three-hour runtime scare you.
If the movie is good, you are in good hands.
And I was engaged throughout the entire runtime of this, even if things weren’t perfect.
But yeah, three hours was not actually that crazy for this film, and I’m looking forward to, you know, nine more of them.
But we got to get into our actual ratings.
But before we do, we want to take a look at ratings from a couple of popular sites.
And I don’t know, Nathan, did you look up any of these ratings beforehand?
You know what, I was looking at different sites, and I should have taken note of the ratings.
I think I did glance at them, so my answers might be more skewed this time.
Well, we’ll see how accurate you are with these.
I’ll see if my subconscious picked up anything, because I can’t remember anything off the top of my head, but I think I retained a general idea.
We’ll see.
So the first up is Ron Tomato Critic Rating.
This is the percentage of critics who were favorable towards the movie.
The 76, I think?
It’s 47%.
So I did not remember at all.
Maybe you’re thinking of the Ron Tomato’s audience rating.
That was 52, wasn’t it?
71%.
I did not retain a single thing I read.
I almost feel like I have to double check, but I trust those numbers right now.
For some reason, I thought it was backwards.
The IMDB, they use the 10 scale, 10 point rating.
What’s the average on IMDB?
4.2.
4.2?
7.1.
Oh, that’s awesome.
I just thought this was more niche, and I thought I was in the minority here of enjoying this movie.
I am literally kind of shocked at how high the IMDB rating is on that.
To me, that’s 7 and over on IMDB is a good movie.
At Letterboxd, 5.5 star system.
What’s the Letterboxd user rating average?
Okay, now I’m second guessing everything.
I’ll go 3.2.
It’s close.
It’s out of 3.0 right now.
I have no idea.
Here’s my finger, far from the pulse.
Honestly, if I didn’t look it up, I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about this.
I thought for sure I’d look that up.
Was I thinking Adam Webb?
That would have been probably lower.
It should have been a lot lower.
But if you told me, Rod Tomato audience, if you made me guess that, I would have thought maybe 35%, 40%.
I never thought 70% were enjoying it.
After watching it, I’m like, yeah, OK, I can see that.
But based on the box office, nobody’s going to this movie.
That’s kind of what I was basing it off of.
It’s a real shame, because not all of a sudden you have, here’s a unique Western, wasn’t a sequel, wasn’t part of any big budget franchise.
It was trying to start its own franchise, obviously.
But people didn’t come out for it.
I don’t know.
Not everybody has to like everything.
But every once in a while, I’ll go to movies with people to see stuff I don’t particularly want to see, but I’ll give it a try.
I don’t know.
It’s kind of a bummer that you get experiments like this, or you get a passion project, and, you know, it kind of falls flat.
What is your five-star rating with a possible like bonus?
So as a reminder, we use the Letterboxd platform.
Five stars, they give a possible heart.
It is how you interpret it, however you do.
But what do you think about, when you put your diary entry in on Horizon?
What did I do?
I just want to confirm one thing.
Okay, yes, Horizon American Saga.
So I gave it four out of five stars plus the like.
Yeah, plus the like, okay.
Plus just for the sheer audacity of the scale and vision of what Kevin Costner was doing.
He said, here’s a movie that I can’t get financed.
I’m going to self-finance a bunch of it myself, and I’m going to make four of them instead of one and gamble everything I have.
He had this exit from this TV show, Yellowstone, and he left the sure thing to make a bet on himself and on this idea, and the sheer audacity, the scope of the storytelling, it was so operatic, so grand, so epic, so different from anything that else that’s out there right now.
I have to give credit where credit is due.
But I think this is, I’m getting the feeling this is more like a Cadoon situation, where after watching the second, maybe the third and fourth ones, watching it as a whole, it might be…
It’ll be a go up or down.
Anyway, what was your rating coming out of this?
So I gave it three and a half stars.
Which, I…
Yeah, I wasn’t really waffling too much.
I wanted three and a half stars.
I do see there are some issues in it.
Yeah, it’s not perfect.
And it could be maybe just because it is part one.
You know, it’s not…
There is a proper climax to the film and everything.
It all works.
Everything is structurally sound.
You don’t get conclusions to a lot of stuff.
It’s almost like this trend after doing this podcast and talking about all these part ones or part twos or threes or whatever.
There just inherently cannot be five-star films, it seems.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I think we had the same discussion around…
Across the Spider-Verse, I guess.
Across the Spider-Verse, for sure.
It was an amazing movie, and I think I just couldn’t quite give it that last half a star just because, yeah, it just felt like it was incomplete.
And I think the same thing is true here.
And even Dune and Dune…
Dune, part one, part two.
Dune, part one, for sure.
I think it was four and a half for both of us.
Yeah, yeah.
I think we’re noticing a trend for us.
There’s a common trend for Brian and I.
It’s like, yeah, finish a goddamn film.
But I also…
This is a little bonus on my rating here.
I was specifically holding this back from my diary because I know some people look at it.
And I will update my diary when this episode goes live, if I remember, of course.
But I am giving this movie the heart.
I’m giving it the heart.
I got to give it the heart because I was turned around on the film.
I doubted Costner.
This is also my introduction to Costner’s direction.
And if his older stuff is better, I’m super pumped to go back in and watch some of these older films that he’s done and starred in.
No, I think it was a good movie.
Like you said, it’s not without its flaws, and that’s fine.
But I was there for it, and I was excited for part two.
I still am, but I’m disappointed we’re not getting it in theaters right away.
No, there was something.
I left the theater, I felt like, full to the point of bursting almost.
My head was spinning afterwards.
I felt like I was sucked into this world.
I felt like I was a part of this world, that escapist element of cinema.
And so that’s another reason I gave it that hard as well.
So yeah, that’s great.
We were only half a star apart, so I think we were pretty close on this movie.
So yeah, if you have a chance, check out Horizon Zero Dawn in theaters if you get a chance, or if it’s on streaming now, check it out.
Buu So’s numbers.
Not just for the sake of the two of us who want to see more of this, but you know, like this is somebody who obviously cares a lot about the story they’re trying to tell, put a lot of care and effort into this, telling this grand story, this grand vision, something you don’t see every day.
And then, yeah, if you’re like Brian, haven’t seen Kevin Costner’s directorial efforts, directorial efforts, go check out my recommendation, next one, Dances with Wolves, Academy Award winning film.
Great, great movie.
Obviously, you’re going to run into issues with like the White Savior motif and things like that.
It’s not a perfect movie either.
And looking at a different lens, like in 2024 than probably back in the 90s, 100%, still doesn’t detract from the greatness of that movie.
Dances with Wolves, your next step on the Kevin Costner director journey.
Well said.
As always, we appreciate you hanging out with us today and taking the time to listen to our podcast.
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