An average movie

Sure, like anyone else, I have noticed that this movie was a flop when it was released but, since it was available on HBO Max, I thought I might as well check it out anyway. Well, to be honest, it was rather hard to judge this movie after all. Indeed, sure, the whole thing did feel like a rather misguided egomaniac project from Kevin Costner and you might wonder if he will manage to deliver the 4 movies he planned to do (seriously, all together, the whole thing would be around 12 hrs of running time..). And, yet, I have to admit that it was visually not bad at all and there was definitely something epic about it. Concerning the characters, I was not so sure. I mean, there were many of them so there was definitely some variety, depicting some many different perspectives on how you could live back then on the Frontier. But was any of them really interesting though? Not really. The episodic structure certainly didn’t help any of them though. Indeed, I think the main issue was that the format was not suited at all for what Costner wanted to achieve. For some reason, he thought that to release 4 epic Westerns as feature length features was the way to go but it seemed to be pretty obvious that a mini-series format on any streaming service would have been such a better choice. Eventually, you might wonder if by scaling down and removing some of the characters and some of the sub-plots, the whole thing might have been so much improved but I guess that’s what you get when a movie star spends seemingly all his money to do whatever he wants. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was actually a decent watch, I didn’t notice that it was 3hrs long which is always a good sign and I think it is worth a look, at least, if you like the genre. 

6/10