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AT THE HEART OF HORIZON: AN AMERICAN SAGA, the prodigiously ambitious and dramatically potent western epic starring and directed by Kevin Costner, there is a scene where the commander of a farflung 1860s Army post (Danny Huston) explains to a concerned subordinate (Sam Worthington) why, despite the rigors of overland travel by wagon train, and despite the repeated attacks by Indians who are understandably protective of their land, nothing will stop the seemingly endless waves of pioneers bent on settling the West.
“These people,” the commander says, not entirely sympathetically, “think that if they’re tough enough, smart enough, and mean enough, all this will be theirs someday. There’s no army of this earth that will stop those wagons coming. Little as they be wanted.”
But what will happen when those hearty pioneers see along the sides of the trail the countless graves of those who went before them, and didn’t survive the journey?
The commander shrugs. The newcomers will think they’re luckier, and that they’ll survive and thrive. “And you know what?” he adds. “Some of them will.”
Costner intends as ultimately a series of four films — with the first two opening this summer, June 28 and August 16 — that, while focusing on a roughly 15-year period before and after the Civil War, will dramatize, even-handedly and excitingly, how the allure and promise of new lives in a new land fueled an unshakable belief in what has become known, for better or worse, as
