I started my Directed By Kevin Costner journey back in October, looking at the films of 1990, the year he made Dances with Wolves and won Best Director for his efforts. Among the competition both at the box office and the Oscars was The Godfather Part III and its director, Francis Ford Coppola. Both men came back in 2024 with passion projects financed either partially or in whole from their own pockets. Both projects were highly anticipated, at least by me.
For Costner, it was the realization of a dream he'd had since 1988, when he first began to conceive the idea of 1 western epic that would tell the full story about the settling of the land before, during, and after the Civil War. Throughout the years, studios would show some interest, with Disney coming closest to greenlighting it after the success of Open Range in 2003. Budget disputes killed that one. As Costner continued to wait for his vision to come to fruition, that vision grew and grew. What started as a single epic became, by 2012, a four-part saga with an ensemble cast that includes soldiers, gunslingers, Apache...you know, western folk. He put $38 million of his own money into filming the first two installments, which were finally shot and set to be released through Warner Brothers within two months of each other, beginning in Summer 2024. Chapter One came out on June 28. It did so poorly Chapter Two, originally set for August 16, 2024, still hasn't come out.
For Coppola, it was the realization of a dream he'd had since 1977, when he first conceived of a modern epic inspired by H.G. Wells and Roman history. Through the years, he wrote, rewrote, adjusted, expanded, shortened - in 1983 he had amassed 400 pages of screenplay, outline, and notes. Twice the film was almost made, but he couldn’t get financing in 1989 and 9/11 killed the mood in 2001, especially as part of the film involves Manhattan being destroyed. Twenty years later, the success of his winery and other investments allowed him the resources to realize his vision without compromise: with $120 million of his own money, Coppola filmed his Megalopolis, about a visionary architect clashing with a corrupt mayor in a future New York now called New Rome, complete with an indoor Colosseum. It was not a box office success, ending its run with a worldwide gross of $14 million.
We know how a movie does at the box office isn't the full story, history is full of classics that bombed in their time (Carpenter's The Thing!). So - are these movies any good?
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter One
dir: Kevin Costner
pr: Kevin Costner / Mark George Gillard / Howard Kaplan
scr: Jon Baird & Kevin Costner, story by Jon Baird & Kevin Costner and Mark Kasdan
cin: J. Michael Muro
Like it says, it’s a first chapter, so you can’t be too disappointed if it feels like the credits roll before it’s barely started. Besides, there is at least one full story: that of a boy who sees his family killed by Apache, seeks revenge, and ends up riding with marauders who are less interested in specific vengeance against warriors than they are in general genocide of men, women, and children. It’s all too brief but it’s the most interesting and complex of the many, many stories of Horizon, which also includes naive homesteaders, widows falling in love with soldiers, and Michael Rooker doing Victor McLaglen, just as Costner is “doing” Hawks and Ford. It would be charming were it not so jarringly edited and incomplete. It is one thing to say a film is “part one” of a larger story, but a three hour-long setup that ends in a two-minute “on the next Horizon…” sizzle reel is too much. Villeneuve’s first Dune and this year’s Wicked could both end where they are without ever getting a sequel and you’ve still gotten a full movie. You don’t get that with Horizon, you get 180 minutes of the promise of something more - though with some of these stories and performances, that’s hardly tantalizing. It is the nadir of his career as a director, I am sorry to say.
Megalopolis
dir/scr: Francis Ford Coppola
pr: Michael Bederman / Francis Ford Coppola / Barry J. Hirsch / Fred Roos
cin: Mihai Malaimare, Jr.
Nothing about this film is consistent. Conflicts are introduced and dropped sometimes within the same scene. Characters reach an understanding in one scene then are back to being sworn enemies without any context. Performances vary from sublime to atrocious - and that’s just describing one actor. Villainous plots require independent research after the film to suss out the why and the how. And there’s no getting away from the feeling that all this is Coppola’s big, “Won’t people just let me be a goddam GENIUS” statement. It’s self-indulgent, over the top, a million things are wrong with it. I wound up digging it, maybe loving it. It’s a drunken, impassioned rant about how beautiful the world can be, even the bizarro structure feels like a reference to old texts, folk tales and fables (like the Pharaoh in Exodus, Mayor Cicero goes back and forth between showing mercy and hardening his heart), and when Kathryn Hunter beckoned her husband to join her on a moving sidewalk destined for a future of hope and possibility, I wept. I expect more people to like the dull competence of Horizon, but blessed are the Megalopolis fans, for they embrace the mess and illogic of love and life.
My Top Ten of 2024 tomorrow.
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