Early on into the three hours of viewing Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 I thought back to last year’s Cannes Film Festival, where I saw Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for the first time. That brilliant movie is a full throated condemnation of the genocide of Native Americans by white people who claim the U.S. as their own. Horizon is not that.

Instead, one of the inciting incidents in the unwieldy film that Costner directs is a violent Apache assault on a settlement. The mostly white settlers are portrayed as terrified innocents. Sienna Miller’s Frances hides underneath her house with her similarly blonde daughter (Georgia MacPhail) while her husband and son are murdered. They are shot in beatific fashion, meanwhile, the Native American assailants are shadowy figures who attack unprovoked. There are nods to nuance that come later, but far too little in the first part of Costner's passion project, which debuted at the festival.

Everything about Horizon is retrograde. Men are noble heroes (like Hayes Ellison, the........

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