Horizon: An American Saga

This week we’re looking at an unusual film on multiple fronts: Horizon is set to be released in two parts in the span of a couple of months this summer, with two additional parts yet to come and its director Kevin Costner said to be backing the film with his own money. For those who know, however, Costner is no upstart to the genre; 1990’s Dances with Wolves earned seven Academy Awards and is often referred to as a landmark film in the history of Westerns. Later, 2003’s Open Range was also a critical and commercial success; it all bodes well for the Western Horizon.

Granted, an epic Western demands an epic musical score, and John Debney (The Passion of the Christ, Iron Man 2, The Princess Diaries, among others) obliges with a soundtrack performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The trailer’s first few seconds focus on foreboding, low brass, followed by urgent arpeggiated strings simmering in the background. Broad, sweeping chord changes—to fit the endless landscape—are the order of the day, punctuating the lines in the monologue.

After the director’s title card, we transition at 0:54 into horror tropes a bit, with an audiovisual blackout at 0:57 preceding the burning of a settlement. Against the flames, we hear in contrast a hymn-like tune, with a lone voice against a bed of strings. The full orchestra comes back in a sea of sound, set against a montage depicting both Indigenous peoples and settlers. Notice how the gunshot at 1:39 synchs to the music, serving as a violent contrast to the music—a reminder of the brutality of the period, even while romanticizing it.

The arrangement steadily builds from there, with epic percussion punctuating each measure of the hymn tune; the voices are doubled in the strings, and we continue to see a variety of action-oriented and dramatic scenes, with the occasional line of dialogue thrown in for good measure.

Perhaps what’s most notable about the music for this trailer is its consistency—there’s little to nothing in the way of sudden shifts of tone, tempo, orchestration, or otherwise. Instead, we largely get a steady tune, carried over a few minutes and unrelenting in its execution. This seems to fit the ethos of the trailer (and presumably the film) quite well. There’s an overall style of cinematography present that seems to unapologetically hearken back to Costner’s previous films, and to the kind of cinematic Western that permeated the popular imagination in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, long before the dystopian Wests of Westworld and Fallout came to the screen. Regardless of whether that’s a winning formula, one can’t fault Costner lacking vision, and Debney’s score responds in kind.

Horizon: An American Saga arrives in theatres on June 28th (Chapter 1) and August 16th (Chapter 2).

— Curtis Perry