I’m pretty sorry to hear that Horizon Chapter 2 has been pulled from its original August release. I saw Chapter 1 again and it was much clearer the second time around. It still suffers from the basic flaw of not knowing who the characters are when they first appear on the screen. Jenna Malone, for example, goes up to some house, shoots a man in the chest twice, then flees with some horses and a baby in her wagon. First she lets a horse out of its pen and slaps it on the rump to make it run away. That’s the last time we see her until, perhaps, an hour later when Kevin Costner has finally entered the movie. She is living in some mining town which has a corner store and a hotel and presumably a saloon. She has a woman living with her who appears to be a local prostitute. The baby is a bit grown now, maybe 2, and at first I couldn’t fathom what they were all doing together. But it turns out that the prostitute was hired to look after the baby while Jenna did other chores. There is a man involved who she doesn’t seem to like too much and he’s got some sort of idea that he can get more money for some land he leased to this pair of brothers. This gets him killed. But after the second viewing I finally understood that these brothers have been chasing her to get back the child. You don’t know what happens to Jenna Malone. But the prostitute ends up leaving the child with some Chinese family and disappearing. The implication is that she is going to go to Horizon and try to make a life there. This is the same town that keeps getting burned, and I’m guessing, over the course of the four movies, the town will be established after a shit load of blood shed. In fact, everything in the first installment, suggests that all these diverse characters are making their way to Horizon. Costner, the prostitute, a wagon train with Luke Wilson, some horribly written and acted English couple, with two obvious rapists, and an assortment of sod busters. One brother is dead and now the other is trying to find Costner, who killed him. He’ll probably end up in Horizon too. Then it occurred to me why he called this town “Horizon.” Because all roads lead to (the) Horizon.
The music is not as good as I thought, so I have to take that back, although I did enjoy the final montage. But it’s really the characterization that does the movie under. You just can’t figure out who is who and in some cases what they even want. These are amateur mistakes. And it was extremely disappointing that Costner is catering to the right wingers by quoting Glenn Beck. (The maga crowd didn’t show up to save the movie in any event.) And he’s also shooting the third installment now, so maybe people will come around, the way they came around to Shelly Duvall’s performance in The Shining and a smaller number came around to Michael Cimino’s disaster, “Heaven’s Gate.”
Speaking of (RIP) Shelly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a genuine scream as that moment when Jack Nicholson is chopping at the bathroom door with the axe, and the moment when she sees the entire head of the axe come through the door. Her screams go gutteral and raw just at that moment, as if she hadn’t realized it was really an axe that he was using. It was like she “shone” for a moment, and saw her dead body.