Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (2024) - Costner's glorious cinematic passion project needs your theatrical support now

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Star-filmmaker Kevin Costner is the lone man in the wild west on this sparse poster for his Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1

Along a river in the open desert range landscape of Arizona, settlers attempt to start a new life with a town called Horizon, but the surrounding Apache natives don't welcome their advance. In Montana horse trader Hayes Ellison meets beautiful prostitute Marigold and soon have to flee the mining town with her following the murder of local hood Caleb Sykes.

Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is written by Jon Baird (National Parks (2022, executive producer)) and co-writer/co-producer/co-star/director Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves (1990)), with Mark Kasdan (Silverado (1985)) contributing story elements. It is the first in an epic 4-part film series devised by Costner.

If Costner succeeds in making and releasing 4 epic Horizon westerns, it is quite a feat, especially since the first one has not landed to the audience reception one would have hoped for but rather to widespread indifference, regrettably. Costner is an incredible character in the film world with both towering highs (Field of Dreams (1989), Dances with Wolves (1990)) and stupefying lows (Waterworld (1995), The Postman (1997)) in his long career. This western mega-project will be one for the history books, IF he succeeds.

Horizon moves along with what may be termed a 'luxurious' pace, somewhat akin to a fine TV-series, because it means to tell its multi-character tale over the course of not 90 minutes but rather something like 720 minutes (4 x 180 minutes). For those willing and able to appreciate fully immersing in an epic narrative, it is a luxurious treat to get into a work such as this. Horizon is a gift for every western lover out there, and one that demands to be seen on the big screen. Fabulous American landscapes are captured magnificently (by cinematographer J. Michael Muro (Parker (2013))), and the score (by John Debney (Luck (2022))) thunders appropriately up and down as suspense wanes and accelerates. 

The impressive production has a fine cast behind Costner in the ten gallon hat: Sienna Miller (Live by Night (2016)), Sam Worthington (Lansky (2021)), Danny Huston (Succession (2019, TV-series)), Abbey Lee (Caprice (2018)), Michael Rooker (Fairfax (2022, TV-series)), Elizabeth Dennehy (Hancock (2008)), Jamie Campbell Bower (The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (2013)) and Charles Halford (Joe Bell (2020)) all give full, engaged, commendable performances. A large Native American cast also lend authentic feeling and insight into the film's fabric.

There's plenty to admire and become taken in by in the first part of Costner's opus magnum, and I will surely be ready to enjoy Part II as it releases in a good month's time.

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Kevin Costner: Molly's Game (2017) - Chastain is luminous in Sorkin's great true-crime debut (co-star)

Man of Steel (2013) or, Superman v Zod: Sunset of Destruction (co-star)

2003 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II] 

Open Range (2003) - Costner impresses with fabulous classic western

Thirteen Days (2000) - Electrifying Cuban Missile Crisis thriller (actor/producer)  

The Postman (1997) - Costner's colossal apocalyptic turkey 

Dances with Wolves (1990) - Costner's triumphant, simpatico western

 

 

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: Reportedly 100 mil. $

Box office: 17.2 mil. $ and counting

= Too early to say

[Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 premiered 19 May (Cannes Film Festival, out of competition) and runs 181 minutes. Development of Horizon reportedly began in 1988. Costner has allegedly injected 38 mil. $ of his own money into the making of the film and reportedly also pays for marketing on top of this, possibly, although the details are hazy. Shooting took place from August - November 2022 in Utah. The upcoming Part II has been shot, and shooting of Part III is seemingly taking place right now. Whether all three remaining parts will see their day of release is unknown. The film opened #3, behind holdover hit Inside Out 2 and fellow new release A Quiet Place: Day One, to an 11 mil. $ first weekend in North America. The film's foreign numbers look abysmal so far. The film has one market yet to release in: Germany on 22 August. Costner returns with Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 2 (2024), also as an actor. Miller also returns in that film; Worthington returned first in The Exorcism (2024). Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 is rotten at 46 % with a 5.60/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

 

What do you think of Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1?

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) - Gunn returns Marvel's top franchise in fine shape

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+ Best Action Movie of the Year

A stuffed, eye-popping, deliciously colorful poster for James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

Peter 'Star-Lord' Quill leads the Guardians in space, as they are saved by a mysterious stranger with tremendous powers, who just might be Quill's mysterious biological father...

The sequel to crowd-pleasing hit Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) sees its writer-director James Gunn (Slither (2006)) return with a new vision and story, set in the same universe of hijinks and colorful, witty glee as the first one. Gunn did not write this based on any single Guardians comic book, - but the film has a staggering 10 (!) additional character writing credits listed, (which I won't deign to award more space here.)
Chris Pratt (Her (2013)) is still an ideal Quill, who goes through a larger dramatic arc here, as he searches out his father and his feelings about him versus stepfather Yondu. Michael Rooker (Undisputed (2002)) is back as the flawed, ostracized Yondu, who seeks redemption, and he is great in the part. SPOILER Kurt Russell (The Barefoot Executive (1971)) turns out to be Quill's biological father, a God with his own planet by the name of Ego, who unsurprisingly turns out to be less benign than the first shots of him leads us to believe, (scenes which also implicitly poke fun at Russell's own voluminous hairdo in the 1980s.)
Vol. 2 has many storylines, and it may not be clear all the time, which is the main one, but much of this also comes from its ambition to further our connection with each of the Guardian characters. The first film was similar in this, which is also why you will likely have a hard time recounting the plot of the film today, (if you haven't rewatched it recently.) - The Guardians movies seem to be more about the fun had along the way than the actual stories involved. - Which is fine, especially because they are fun and dazzling. The use of 3D makes sense here, and the film makes use of music in untraditional ways, which heightens the enjoyment. (Only I found that Pratt sometimes seems to be pushed together when in full character in the screen's middle, making him appear at those times disproportional and stocky.)
Zoe Saldana (Blackout (2007)) is still a cool fan-boy fantasy as Gamora; Dave Bautista (Spectre (2015)) is one of my favorite parts of the film and gets to laugh loudly several times, which is for some reason hugely enjoyable. Vin Diesel (Strays (1997)) returns for another one of the easiest top billings perhaps in cinema history, voicing now adorable Baby Groot's "I am Groot" several times, (and to be fair, this time in no less than 16 languages, for different major markets, I read.) The film also has Sylvester Stallone (Rocky V (1990)) in a fairly small part that seems likely to build in the next movie; Pom Klementieff (Borderline (2011)) is funny as Mantis, who shares some good scenes with Drax, and Elizabeth Debicki (The Night Manager (2016), miniseries) is an icy and comic villain in all-gold.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is light and breezy good entertainment that announces the coming of the summer blockbuster season with a joyous roar. The visuals and CGI is top notch, but the CGI is also so ubiquitous that we are not as awed as we otherwise might have been by its most impressive aspects. Somehow the overall feeling isn't as real as in the first film and there are significantly fewer wow-moments. It is also a bit long and definitely not made with anything resembling a less-is-more attitude. Instead it is more of all the stuff Gunn served so appealingly and enthusiastically in the first film.
And, luckily, that still seems to go over very well.

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Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - Get giddy with this pretty awesome, the silliest summer blockbuster of the 2014

Watch an official trailer for the film here

Cost: 200 mil. $
Box office: 431.5 mil. $ and counting
= Too early to say
[Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 premiered 19 April (LA) and runs 136 minutes. Shooting took place in and around the Pinewood Atlanta Studios in Atlanta, Georgia from February - June 2016 with reshoots in November 2016. It is the first film to be shot with an 8K resolution camera, the Red Weapon 8K. More sets were created for the shoot than for the first film. If the above-stated cost is accurate, which it may not be, it is down 13.9 % from the ballooned 232.3 mil. $ budget of the first film. Vol. 2 has opened on 400 IMAX screens in China as part of its release in the country, the highest number of such screens ever for a release. It opened to a stellar 146.5 mil. $ first weekend in North America (up 55 % from the first film's 94.3 mil. $), and has already become the 6th highest grossing film of the year. Gunn is already announced to be coming back for a third Guardians movie. Vol. 2 has already gained traction onto IMDb's user-generated Top 250: It sits at #211, between The Princess Bride (1987) and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015). Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is certified fresh at 81 % with a 7.1 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2?

Days of Thunder (1990) or, Very Little Thunder

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The flashy poster for Tony Scott's Days of Thunder doesn't exactly sell its star Tom Cruise short

QUICK REVIEW:

The prince of racing and his ups and downs.

Thunder presents a thick story that's simultaneously a thin story, you might say. Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015)) is terrific from first shot, while Randy Quaid (Not Another Teen Movie (2001)) and Robert Duvall (True Confessions (1981)) yell and scream, respectively, while trotting around in the background in this dull case, which is an obvious attempt to make a new Top Gun (1986), only in new surroundings.
Nicole Kidman (Eyes Wide Shut (1999)) has charm as Cruise's love interest, - the two got married off-camera in 1990, (and divorced 11 years later), - and the two, understandably, have good chemistry here, but Kidman's role in Thunder is far beneath her talent. And that is a general problem for this weak, only slightly interesting serving of sports nonsense.
It was written by Robert Towne (Shampoo (1975)), with Cruise supplying story elements, and directed by the late English master filmmaker Tony Scott (The Hunger (1983)).
- Not much thunder in this vehicle.

Related reviews:
 
Tony Scott: Stoker (2013) - Chan-wook Park's over-styled American debut revolts and bores in turns (producer)  
Déjà Vu (2006) - T. Scott cuts a helluva suspense-cake!
Domino (2005) - T. Scott's bounty-hunter biopic a complete misfire, mega-flop

Watch the original trailer for the film here

Cost: 60 mil. $
Box office: 157.9 mil. $
= Box office success
[Days of Thunder was released June 27 and runs 108 minutes. It was shot in Daytona and Charlotte, North Carolina from January - May 1990, going no less than 3 months over schedule. The shoot was fraught with problems and a team of producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, writer Towne and director Scott, who argued a lot and, reportedly especially the former three, increased the spendings drastically with outrageous production decisions like building a private gym for themselves, giving away designer dresses to woo women, building sets multiple times, throwing expensive parties and pressing cast and crew members to work (expensive) overtime. The result was a nearly doubled budget that could have posed a serious problem for them all. But the film opened #1 to 15.4 mil. $ in North America, where it grossed 82.6 mil. $ (52.3 % of the total gross). The film was Oscar-nominated for Best Sound, losing to Dances with Wolves (1990). It was also successful on video, making at least an additional 40 mil. $ there. - But the bloated budget and diminished quality of the film still makes its success much smaller than Top Gun's, which made back its budget almost 24 times, (Thunder only did so 2.6 times.) Days of Thunder is rotten at 38 % with a 4.8 critical average on Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Days of Thunder?

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) - Get giddy with this pretty awesome, silliest blockbuster of 2014

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+ Best Blockbuster of the Year

A delicious-looking poster for James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy

Guardians is a new Marvel comic book adaptation of one of their more wacky properties, which looks like it will turn into its own movie franchise now:

Peter 'Star-Lord' Quill thinks he's all human: He has been taken from Earth following his mother's death in his childhood and is now a bounty-hunter after a very powerful and expensive orb. He gets it, but also becomes locked up with a band of celestial misfits (see posters). They break out, loose the orb and realize that it can be used to kill billions of innocents, so they decide to get it back to prevent that from happening.

Our outlaw heroes in Guardians are good, even if they are primarily out for money and revenge. Guardians of the Galaxy is a somewhat silly, off-center universe, which is apparent right off the bat as Star-Lord, - charmingly played by Chris Pratt (Her (2013)), - starts his dangerous orb-retrieval mission by dancing around to Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede, - just one of the film's many 1970's and 80's pop-rock-hits that make it all a little groovier. - And sillier and more refreshing than most superhero movies in recent years.
But the characters in themselves are also so strange that it would have been a catastrophe for any writer-director to have taken it all too deadly serious. And James Gunn (Slither (2006)) certainly doesn't choose that road: Guardians is probably the most irreverent, self-humorous huge superhero space opera creation of this millennium.
Bradley Cooper voices the raccoon Rocket, wrestler Dave Bautista is the intellectually limited but hard-punching Drax, and Vin Diesel, - in what must be one of the easiest earned top-billings ever, - voices the giant, living tree Groot, who can only say, 'I am Groot'. They are all fun characters. Michael Rooker (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)) is a good difficult stepfather for Quill called Yondu, and John C. Reilly (Step Brothers (2008)) is fun as 'Corpsman Dey'. Glenn Close (Dangerous Liaisons (1988)) looks crazy as a tight-haired leader of the peaceful human planet.

They have apparently built some real, huge sets in London for the shooting of Guardians, which is hard to notice in it, because it looks almost completely animated. It is not a critique per se, because it has a consistent look and impressive stuff like the various skies and fights, - which are fun, but still don't draw out and eat up all the room from story and dialog, - but the tour de force cinematic experience is hard to achieve in an environment that feels so artificial as is the case in Guardians and other similar CGI-based giants.
Where Star Wars, in comparison, is always about good vs. evil, this the first Guardians film is more about friendship and comradeship, and diversity meeting and becoming unity, and very timely at that. By its end, the film is a sure and quite uplifting winner.
Guardians is certainly also the funniest major summer blockbuster ride of 2014, and it will certainly stimulate kids and make adults giddy from its permanent wit. Where Avengers (2012) entertained but at the same time punctured my last bit of superhero enthusiasm, Guardians is a new Marvel franchise that I found myself actually looking forward to seeing return by the end of the film. It seems also a good replacement for the X-Men franchise that I at Film Excess deemed obsolete a few months ago.
Guardians has one really vulgar, adult referential joke, (which I don't think it absolutely needed), but it will shoot (bad but as you'll realize; appropriate pun again) right over the heads of the younger ones in the audience, so I'd say the film is fine for any media-trained kid who is 8 years or older.
Pratt was sure fun here, but I hope he will have another, much more serious role to play in next summer's highly anticipated Jurassic World (2015), which will have to be a lot more serious than Guardians to be any bit scary. 

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2014 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
 

Watch the trailer here

Cost: 232.3 mil. $
Box office: 773.3 mil. $
= Box office success

What do you think of Guardians of the Galaxy?

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) - A deeply unsettling portrait

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A chilling, blood-smeared poster for John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Inspired by real life serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to 300 killings, was convicted of 11 and died of heart failure in a Texas jail in 2001, this is the low-budget fiction debut of co-writer/co-producer/director John McNaughton (Mad Dog and Glory (1993)).

The film is not a regular horror ride, but truly a portrait of a modern, urban serial killer, made in a gritty, realistic, cinema verité-inspired style. It is therefore not a film that technically resembles past greats in the serial killer sub-genre such as Fritz Lang's M (1931) (about a child-murderer), Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) or Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991). It is closer to Patty Jenkins' true-crime portrait Monster (2003), about prostitute and serial killer Aileen Wuornos, although Henry is more chilling and exciting to watch I think. McNaughton co-wrote it with Richard Fire (Bleacher Bums (1979), TV movie).
The film features many grisly murders, (including chillingly realistic 'neck snappings'), but has a rather flat narrative structure that doesn't loan it lots of suspense, but which on the other hand adds to its realistic quality. SPOILER The most disturbing of the murders in the film is videotaped by Henry and his accomplice Otis and played back afterwards for their enjoyment. Watching this scene and other outpourings of horrors in Henry, you may well get the feeling that life is not very precious in a big, modern city. The real world's authorities have denied the real Henry's claims of some 300 killings, but I wonder; could it simply be an assertion that's so unbearably awful (not to say shameful and embarrassing) and revealing of human neglect in a big metropolis of calamitous proportions that denial was simply what they chose to go with in order to maintain some sense of a desirable self-image? - A nomadic serial killer in the US killing around 300 people over a long period of time, true or not, is indeed a very disconcerting idea.
Michael Rooker (Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)) is really good as Henry. And all the other performances are equally solid. There seems to be no moral center in these callous fringe characters. Yet Henry is able to talk about love at one point. At another point he and Otis discuss how to be a "successful" serial killer. Understood as one who can carry on his deeds forever without getting caught. This very intimate portrait of such a killer, without any moral alternatives being offered, really, is in itself a conception that treads the absolute knife's edge of what is morally sound to present to the world. Henry therefore is truly a film that's only appropriate for adult and morally firm-rooted audiences.
It does has a few technical detractors:
The film was originally planned as an early straight-to-video release and only raised to cinema potential while in production. And while the cinematography is done with skill, the image quality isn't quite up to snuff. Also, the music in the first act of the film, especially, doesn't really fit its general style, and it made me doubt whether the movie would be as powerful as I'd heard it is. The choice of music in the beginning seems passé, regrettably.
Despite these minor misgivings, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is an uncommon and uncommonly dark gem that deserves its reputation as a great serial killer film.

Related posts:

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Here's a Q&A with Rooker from the Puerto Rico Comic Con 2014, where he talks of, among lots of other things, Henry

Cost: 0.1 mil. $

Box office: 0.6 mil. $ (US only)

= Huge hit (returned at least 6 times the cost)

[Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer premiered 24 September (Chicago International Film Festival) and runs 83 minutes. Shooting took place in October 1985 in Illinois, including in Chicago. The film spent 3 years on the shelf with its initial X rating before a distributor dared release it unrated, and it continued to get released in foreign markets in '90, '91, '92 and '93. Foreign box office numbers are not available, but it is reported that almost 100,000 people paid admission to see it in Spain, which indicates that the final world gross may be double the number indicated above. The film was nominated for 6 Independent Spirit awards. McNaughton returned with The Borrower (1991). Rooker returned in Light of Day (1987). Henry has an unofficial sequel called Henry II: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1996), not by the original cast or crew and seemingly not worth checking out. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is certified fresh at 90% at Rotten Tomatoes.]

  

What do you think of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer?