Home on the Range: HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA - CHAPTER 1

It begins with a massacre and ends with a massacre. Kevin Costner’s return to the director’s chair, Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1, may be merely the opening of a much longer project—and feels it, baggy with detail and spacious with introductions and set-ups, withholding all payoff for much, much later. But its intentions are already becoming clear. Here’s a movie about American Manifest Destiny: settlers moving west and the indigenous pushed out or pushing back. It’s about the violence it takes to recreate a country in your image; it’s about the hope to uproot one’s life only to replant it elsewhere; it’s about the perseverance to maintain your culture and traditions in the face of those who wish to take it from you. As such, the movie is a sturdy and sentimental work, overflowing with character melodramas played out against the backdrop of the American West. But it’s also a tough and fair story, thus far, and prismatic in the way it turns over the scenarios and sees from multiple perspectives. It opens with a small tent city struggling to become something more—a would-be town called Horizon advertised to settlers back east as a place of potential. The townsfolk are slaughtered by nearby natives, leaving dazed survivors to confront a military man who glumly tells them it’ll happen again. The people on whose land they’re attempting to build will not give it up without a fight. Some settlers want to stay. Some flee to the safety of the nearby army outpost. Soon enough, we meet the natives, and see they too are of split loyalties. A chief chastises a warrior who led the attack. Violence makes them all unsafe, he says. Eventually, this long chapter ends with retribution—a pack of miserable mercenaries slaughter an innocent tribe. And the cycle continues.

Between these two bloody action sequences shot through with the excitement of grief and agitation of injustice, we meet many characters in a huge ensemble, and find a great deal of conflict and rooting interest taking place. There’s the strong widow (Sienna Miller) and her angelic young teen daughter (Georgia MacPhail who, in one scene with all-white wardrobe, underlines her role as a literal manifestation of innocence) taken under the wing of a tender-hearted cavalry officer (Sam Worthington). There are the squabbling tensions of a wagon train under the watch of a tired leader (Luke Wilson) leading them inexorably toward Horizon. There’s a taciturn cowboy (Costner, saving his introduction for over an hour) who becomes suddenly, and somewhat reluctantly, invested in the survival of a prostitute (Abbey Lee). She’s stalked by gunmen (with a glowering, pouting Jamie Campbell Bower the most sinister among them) hunting down her friend (Jena Malone), a fugitive who killed their brother—the father of the friend’s child. It’s at once complicated and clear. We start to get a sense of where these stories might go through the conventions of such tales, and the easy rapport the actors build in these characters whose circumstances are historical and dramatic, but shot with a dependable gloss of some more mythic aims. Costner allows for plenty of heroic shots and sweeping landscapes that heighten that larger-than-life feeling as he keeps up a generous pace that’s all rising action. Each sequence is patiently developed in square and sturdy images, sunny and dusty and cut with the grace of a classical engraving. (One character even has a hobby of making sketches for just that purpose.) The film’s playing in the iconographic expected tableau of such an old-fashioned tale, while the complications pile up with the sense that we’re getting somewhere vast and engaging—eventually.

The movie is an expansive, wandering one, content to roll out every kind of Western—historical, pulpy, epic, romantic, bloody, wry—and pile up the tropes of each until they sing anew in a dynamic chorus. Costner is clearly a filmmaker in love with the genre; he’s starred in a few and his entire directorial output is some form of Western—his Dances with Wolves a revisionist take partially from a native perspective, and Open Range a classical rancher shootout showdown. (His The Postman may be post-apocalyptic, but it, too, is all about horses trotting between outposts nonetheless.) With Horizon’s first chapter, he stretches across the plains and the canyons, echoing Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master, Eastwood’s Unforgiven and his own Wolves and Ranges, letting each storyline start brewing with comfortably gripping potential and familiar images. He draws his narratives in languorous shorthand, letting the cliche gather the force of emotional expression from a sincere storyteller. The film’s three hours are engaging and expansive, while feeling lengthy yet somehow quick. I found myself leaving satisfied without any resolution, craving Chapter 2.

Natural Born Killer: AMERICAN SNIPER

A complicated, unsettling movie, American Sniper is torn between rah-rah hagiography and sober anti-war lamentation. Director Clint Eastwood takes the story of Chris Kyle, the late Iraq war veteran the military credits as the deadliest American sniper in history, and makes a movie that’s simultaneously proud of those accomplishments and sorrowful when confronted with the mental and physical toll warfare takes on soldiers and civilians alike. It’s a film that sees the same black and white, good and evil dichotomies as its protagonist, showing enemy combatants terrorizing the war zone, giving the sequences there an omnipresent danger (and stereotypes). Then it follows him home to Texas between deployments, where the remembered sounds of war echo in the silences of daily life. Eastwood wants his audience rooting for the home team, and then wondering if the carnage is worth it.

This is a charitable interpretation of Kyle’s memoir, which was riddled with exaggerations and inventions. Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall have pared back red meat pandering into something murkier. That’s ambiguous enough to make for some queasy responses, especially from those prone to take Kyle’s story as unambiguous heroism and American-might-makes-right flag-waving. But surely only the most sociopathic patriotism could lead someone to watch the opening scene, in which Kyle stares down the barrel of a sniper rifle and makes the decision to shoot a child, in purely heroic terms. Sure, the boy clutched a grenade mere blocks from an oncoming convoy of American troops. But who could watch the boy flung back with the force of the shot, blood splattering out behind him as his mother cries, and feel any amount of pleasure?

Eastwood spent the first part of his career playing the macho American, gun-slinging cowboys, soldiers, and rogue cops who’d do whatever necessary to get their version of justice done. The last few decades, he’s been directing films that dismantled the myth and saw its poison. This film straddles the line uncomfortably. It says some people need these myths to survive, without knowing what to make of that idea. We see Kyle sign up to be a Marine to help his country, with every intention of killing terrorists. He ends up serving four tours in Iraq, where Kyle’s fellow soldiers often call him a hero, especially as his reputation grows. But he’s quick to downplay his accomplishments. When he’s met with questions about the conflict, doubts expressed by his wife, a buddy, or a psychiatrist, he’s equally quick to shrug them off. What does he truly, deep down, think about himself? It’s hard to say, and Eastwood’s not quick to provide his answer.

The answer may be in Bradley Cooper’s performance, one of his best, which brings shadings to a role that could’ve easily been one-note. He plays Kyle as a man stubbornly convinced of his duty, single-minded in his unquestioning pride and instinctual humbleness. This is partly symptomatic of a simply unreflective personality, but Cooper lets us see it as coping mechanism as well. A clear-cut sense of right is the only thing keeping him going after all he’s seen. Down bombed out Iraqi streets, he’s terrorized innocent civilians, invited collateral damage, driven into ambushes, and seen friends die. He’s most in control when hidden on rooftops, looking through his rifle’s scope, hand on the trigger, armed with his sense of purpose. The only way he can maintain his sense of duty, his righteousness, is to shut out dissenting voices. Cooper brings a lumbering physicality to the role, sturdy but carrying clear uncomfortable feelings when others try to tell him who he is. He has a look in the eyes betraying a storm of emotions that never comes to the surface.

The film follows Kyle’s war exploits, presenting them in an amped up, stripped down Hollywood style. Eastwood’s visual stillness and simplicity (from frequent cinematographer Tom Stern) provides crisp, coherent energy to the combat, but at worst fills the frames with swarms of enemies that threaten to look like Call of Duty at times. It’s at once intense and depersonalized. It’s a simple worldview on display. American soldiers are good, individualized, imperiled. Anyone else is there to be suspicious, dangerous, or dead. Sick thrills in the combat sequences let pulpy actioner clichés creep in around the edges, like the enemy sniper who’s a sneering, unknowable villain who leaps to his next perch with parkour moves.

It’s part of the film’s inability to land on any specific ideological perspective. This is a serious and sobering movie (grim gore, funerals, PTSD, tearful phone calls and portent) that also has a scene where a SEAL makes an impossible shot complete with slow-mo bullet arcing through the air (ridiculous) and a last minute dash through an increasingly chaotic sandstorm (thrilling). The film’s able to both satisfy patriotic bloodlust with vaguely true-to-life, but exaggerated, action-thriller filmmaking, and give those of us grossed out by such displays enough grey area cover to feel okay about being unsettled. It’s strategically politically ignorant, and in some moments the head-spinning cognitive dissonance is perhaps more effective and destabilizing than either approach would’ve been alone. It’s evenhanded in its sympathy for every American viewpoint even as it reduces foreign bodies to set dressing and cannon fodder. The film shuts out implications as a way of narrowing the focus, keeping its gaze on its lead.

In the film’s most politically complicated scene, Kyle and his wife (Sienna Miller) attend the funeral of a fallen soldier whose mother reads a letter explaining the deceased’s belief that the war was wrong. Driving home, Kyle blames the man’s death on that perspective. He calls it weakness, though it sure looked like hard-earned skepticism to me, especially considering the man died of enemy fire no pro-war stance would shield. Kyle clings to a black and white world because he needs it to be that way, because he needs to feel 100% justified to survive. Eastwood’s film is an ambiguous inhabitation of that worldview, putting it on display and letting the audience take it for an inkblot test. I saw it as messy, but ultimately more sorrowful than celebratory. Eastwood features real disabled vets in the final scenes, then rolls footage of Kyle's funeral over the credits. Here was a man good at war. Look what war does.

G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

The storyline of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra is so simple a four-year-old child could explain it to you. Lacking a four-year-old child, I will attempt to explain. You see, there are these elite military figures who work together in covert operations. They’re called the G.I. Joes. They’re the good guys. There are also these slimy scientists and weapons developers who are the bad guys. They want to use nanotechnology to, gee, I actually don’t know. Do they want to take over the world, or destroy the Joes, or impersonate the president (played here by Jonathan Pryce)? Maybe that four-year-old would know.

When I went to see the movie, I was handed a free starter pack of cards for a collectible card game called “Top Trumps” starring characters from the movie. I have these sitting next to my computer at the moment. Allow me to look at them and try to figure out what exactly is going on in this movie. As it played I could only tell that good people were fighting bad people and somehow that involved interchangeable nonsense names (like Ripcord and Snake-Eyes) and green super-missiles that release tiny metal-eating robots. I sure hope the cards help decode the film and I won’t have to Google my way to a G.I. Joe fan-site.

First up is General Hawk. He’s played by Dennis Quaid and I could tell he was the leader of the Joes. According to the card, he’s “infamous and inspirational” and also has “the skills and experience of a battle hardened warrior.” I couldn’t prove this by the evidence in the movie, but Quaid does talk with a commanding voice and often scowls.

Next, is something called Neo-Vipers. The card says these are super-soldiers. I remember now that they work for Cobra Commander (or is it just Cobra?) who’s played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Every time he came on screen, I would shake my head. What’s he doing? Collecting a paycheck, I suppose. Anyways, these Neo-Vipers are genetically modified. They’re the bad guys because they can’t feel pain or fear.

Now I’m looking at a card with a white-clad ninja and it looks like his name is Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee). He’s also a bad guy. In battle scenes, he’s usually paired up with Snake Eyes (Ray Park), a G.I. Joe who’s a black-clad ninja. Flashbacks tell us that they share a common history when they both – oh who am I kidding? I don’t care.

There’s a card for a G.I. Joe with the code name Covergirl. She dies early in the picture. Spoiler, I guess. There’s also a card for James McCullen (Christopher Eccleston), a weapons developer who thinks he’s the main baddie. The movie starts in 1600s Scotland with one of his ancestors getting punished for selling weapons to both sides of a conflict. The card says McCullen wants revenge for this, but to the extent that I do understand the evil plot, I can’t see how it will accomplish that goal.

At last we arrive to a card with the main character, a new G.I. Joe recruit who goes by the name Duke. He’s played by Channing Tatum. His best friend and comedic relief is Ripcord (Marlon Wayons). He shares some past with the beautiful villainess played by Sienna Miller. He has a square jaw and, like Quaid, scowls his way through the picture. The card says he’s “the best of the best…or so he thinks.” I’ll take its word for it.

As you can see the movie’s fairly confusing, playing out like a bad cartoon, which is exactly what the movie becomes whenever the action sequences start. I’m not talking brilliantly cartoony, like Speed Racer; I’m talking terribly cartoony, the kind of cartoony that throws all logical plot construction out the window for the sake of pure noise and candy-colored blurs. Admittedly, G.I. Joe is a bit better than Transformers 2, but only because it didn’t give me a headache. It’s also marginally better to look at and, if I’m not mistaken, a little more understandable, if only because human beings with actual faces are easier to tell apart than moving junkyards. There’s an equal amount of cliché-chewing hooey to be found, though, from a plane that can only understand Celtic commands to an evil plot so simple yet so confusing (McCullen sells the missiles, then steals them back in order to shoot them at three major cities). At one point the president marvels that no demands have been made. Same here, buddy.

There was a time, early in the run time, where I thought the movie would actually turn out to be an agreeably goofy time with the kind of dumb fun that director Stephen Sommers has brought to his previous movies like The Mummy or even, yes, Van Helsing. The promise of a good time is there in a chase sequence through the streets of Paris that manages to be fun despite most of it having appeared in the previews. That one sequence is the only glimpse of the promise to be found amongst so much bland and sterile carbon copies of concepts from better popcorn movies, everything from X-Men to the Star Wars prequels. G.I. Joe isn’t exhilarating, it’s just exasperating.