Both as star and producer-director, Kevin Costner has staked his claim to succeed Clint Eastwood as the most prominent modern custodian and practitioner of the American western. Costner’s latest, the laboriously titled Western Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (the first of a promised four), emphatically reaffirms those pretensions.
As well as directing, producing, co-writing, and starring, Costner has invested considerable personal wealth – a reputed US$38 million (£30 million) – in a US$100 million venture he clearly sees as a personal quest.
His planned film series aims to tell the story of the settling of the frontier either side of the civil war from both settler and (to a limited degree) Native American perspectives. It will do so through a sprawling, multi-strand narrative with various threads that will eventually coalesce around the titular Texan township, Horizon.
