It's no Dances with Wolves or Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, but I thoroughly enjoyed this. It is so much like a mini-series. I felt like I've just watched the first season of this new Yellowstone prequel series called "1863". It has that meandering, sweeping quality and how it follows multiple storylines, and that final trailer-of-sorts sealed it for me. Plus I swear at some point during the editing it was switched to a feature film - there are clear episode-ending scene cuts. But despite that feeling I just loved soaking up the western milieu for three hours. I am a fan of Yellowstone and 1883 so this was a nice spiritual companian piece. There are a couple of narrative and structural oddities, but again, it didn't bother me. It could have had its fat trimmed down a bit, such as the aftermath of the initial settlement siege scenes, they really seemed to linger, but I'm also not displeased they bulked it out to 180 minutes - it certainly doesn't feel that long. I could have watched another five hours!

Hopefully part two gets a cinema release. My dad also enjoyed it and expressed interest in the second part. Films like this just don't come out in cinemas, so it's nice to catch them when they do. I cannot even remember if I've seen another American western at the cinema. This might be my first traditional 'cowboys vs Indians' -type western that I've seen on the big screen. I saw The Proposition, but that's Australian, and I saw Cold Mountain, but that's a romance, I saw Shanghai Noon and Wild Wild West but they're not serious. I saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford but that was boring. This really feels like the first time I'd seen a proper western a la High Plains Drifter. Maybe with all those combined I've seen 'cowboys versus Indians' before on the big screen, but seeing Horizon today did nonetheless feel special; a western is not something you can easily catch at the cinema in the last 30 years.

It got me thinking about the legacy of the western lead star. It used to be John Wayne, of course, and he gave the baton to Clint in the early 70s, then Clint gave it to Costner in the 90s and he has been the poster boy now for 30+ years. He should have maybe done another in between 2003 and now, but I think he's making up for it with the one-two punch of Yellowstone and now Horizon.

I think Pedro Pascal would have been this generation's if they still made them often enough.

I liked it, but it's kind of nuts it doesn't really have an ending. There's one final action scene with no resolution and then the movie immediately cuts to a trailer for Chapter 2. Weird.

A quick 181 minutes.

3/5

I almost saw this in theaters a few times but never made it. Looking forward to watching it on Max this weekend.

Easy, breezy watch ... but yeah, there are ways to do a part one with some story resolution rather than just stopping the movie abruptly. Also, its a bit too streched, the Luke Wilson plotline could have been cut. Still pretty good despite it all though. The opening hour is especially pretty thrilling. Should have just stuck with the people who got scattered because of that attack rather than having a bunch of different stories converge into the same place.

I'll give the movie a 7.5. Good effort, poor ending, I'll wach the next one.