Kevin Costner's "Horizon" and "Fly Me to the Moon" with Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. Reviews.

 

Horizon and Fly Me to the Moon
Two films worth seeing in a theater

I want you to go to the movies. Specifically, I want you to see Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One and Fly Me to the Moon, even though both films received some bad reviews.

First, let me explain why I want you to go the movies at all. I'm a teacher, and I'm noticing among young people increasing difficulty in the ability to behave appropriately with other human beings. Families are smaller. Kids are growing up in Brutalist condo developments with no personality, no sidewalks, no churches, no downtown, no community centers. They spend their time alone staring at devices. Many young people today are effectively crippled. They don't make eye contact. They don't say, "Excuse me."

There is an "epidemic" of loneliness in America, according to a recent study. In spite of connectivity and social media, more Americans report feeling lonely now than in the past. The World Health Organization says that loneliness is as bad as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. People who haven't been fully socialized to co-exist with other humans are a pain to be around, and they can be downright dangerous.

Bestselling Harvard scholar and author Robert Putnam says we should start joining bowling leagues, churches, and other clubs and associations. Shared activities are great, but that's not enough. In 2022, I watched Jaws in a packed theater. Jaws was first released in 1975, almost fifty years prior. Most of the adults in that theater had already seen Jaws and they could watch it at home at any time. But they chose to spend money and watch it in a jam-packed theater. Why?

Humans are  unlike, say, lizards or mosquitoes. We need to be in regular contact with a world that doesn't exist. We need to, occasionally, exit objective reality with its imperfect bodies, dashed dreams, scary politics, and square holes into which those of us who are round pegs or even triangle shapes just don't fit. We need "over the rainbow;" "Houston we have a problem;" "This is Sparta!" and "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

Watching movies with others, laughing with them, gasping with them, gives us something we need. Sharing basic human emotions smooths the challenge of being a member of the imperfect human species, those folks we have to share the planet with, who arrive late and stumble over our feet to get to their seats, who use their phone during the movie, those folks who could use some hygiene tips – we share the planet with them whether we want to or not. Laughing together, gasping together, even being bored together, lubricates that work.

Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One is a Western. Fly Me to the Moon is a romantic comedy. Both are movie-movies. To me a movie-movie is a work of art that is aimed directly at a large, average audience. These are not art-house productions aimed at tiny audiences in Greenwich Village and a few college towns.

Film fans can be snobs. They sometimes champion obscure and experimental films aimed at the smallest audience possible. Film fans like to adopt filmmakers like the Hungarian Bela Tarr, whose 1994 film Satantango was described by one fan as "seven hours of poor people walking through mud." Black-and-white Satantango  includes an eight-minute continuous take of cows wandering aimlessly through a dilapidated barnyard. There's also a scene where a girl tortures a cat to death. Many viewers assume that Tarr had his child actress really torture a cat to death. This animal abuse does not prevent critics who are better and smarter than you and I from declaring that Satantango is one of the greatest films ever made. Susan Sontag insists it is "Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I'd be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life."

I don't know if Sontag et al. are just being pretentious. Maybe they say they love obscure films but spend all their time watching Top Gun or Pretty Woman. Or maybe we are just wired completely differently. If I want to see poor people walk through mud or mistreat animals, I can look out the window in Paterson, NJ. The other day, I saw what looked like yet another junkie overdosing on the sidewalk. I got closer, thinking I ought to, yet again, phone emergency rescue personnel. I realized that someone had just dumped three bags of garbage on the street corner; they slumped in such a way as to appear junkie-like. Movie-movies give me something I need, and that films like Satantango never could.

My favorite era is the Golden Age, roughly between, say, It Happened One Night in 1934 and Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. That era was the product of two powerful forces: Judaism and Catholicism. "Jews invented Hollywood," as historian Neal Gabler put it in the title of his 1989 book. These were, often, Ashkenazi Jews who had been the literate people among often illiterate Polish and other peasants. For centuries their ancestors had been telling stories, peddling books, and publishing newspapers. They weren't experimenting. They were conduits channeling forms and bags-of-tricks going all the way back to Genesis.

Catholics like Joseph Breen applied the Hays Code that limited what behaviors films could dramatize. Censors may not have intended this, but their pressure guaranteed that films made under their criteria invited in the largest audience possible. Everyone, from grandma to grandson, could watch a Hays Code film, and they could watch it together. That didn't mean that themes like "poor people walking through mud," or political corruption or crime or rape were not depicted. It means that filmmakers had to find a way to depict their own pet themes in a way that would pass the Hays Code. And passing the Hays Code resulted in a film that lots of people wanted to see.

I've been worried about movies lately. Those Jews and Catholics and their skills have long since passed into history books. What guides American movie-making now? Twister, a movie about tornadoes and storm chasers, came out in 1996. I liked it so much I sat through it, in the theater, twice. I re-watched Twister the other night. I noticed something I had never noticed before. The cast is all white. Makes sense – the film is set in and around Wakita, Oklahoma, which is 97% white. Storm chasers tend to be white. A new film, Twisters, has just opened. The cast now features blacks, Hispanics, and an subcontinental Indian.

Sometimes a focus on DEI precludes a focus on quality. Witness too many poorly reviewed Netlfix romantic comedies that are always sure to depict lovers of different races, and that frequently have very low scores from professional reviewers and fans. If DEI Twisters is as good as all-white Twister, that's great. I'll sit through it twice. But DEI is not the only factor affecting movies and their quality today.

Controversies around recent episodes of Star Wars are instructive. Twenty-first century Woke declares The Star Wars of 1977 to be too white. So a black character, Finn, (John Boyega) was added in 2015. Star Wars' action was mostly driven by male characters. So a female plot-driver and action hero, Rey (Daisy Ridley) became the main character.

Twenty-first century changes to Star Wars weren't just about DEI. Newer Star Wars episodes seemed determined to denigrate everything that had made the previous films beloved. This iconoclasm in the films mirrored iconoclasm in the real world. It had become hip to denigrate America's Founders. We signalled our enlightened status by trashing the Judeo-Christian tradition and Western Civilization. Now we had to denigrate our fictional heroes. Han Solo (Harrison Ford) abandons his wife, Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher). The Jedi temple burns down. Luke Skywalker is cynical about his own tradition and he dies. Han Solo's son is evil and he kills his father.

None of this meant anything to me; I'm not a Star Wars fan. But it meant a lot to Star Wars fans. They felt that something that had brightened their youths and inspired them was destroyed by its own creators. Many blame DEI. The insistence that the original Star Wars was oppressive because it didn't have black men and women heroes felt really bad to them.

But it's more than DEI. In 2019's Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, there's an off-kilter romance between Rey, the spunky, working class gal Jedi, and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), Han Solo's and Princess Leia's son who has turned into a monster. Kylo Ren's goal is to be even worse than his grandfather, Darth Vader.

One of the basics that we've inherited from thousands of years of storytellers is the importance of ending some genres of story with a promise of the future. A bleak, nihilistic ending would be great for some genres, like a Norse myth. The 1956 Japanese classic Duel at Ganryu Island, the final film in the Samurai Trilogy, ends with the hero Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) killing a very worthy opponent. Miyamoto then mourns. He has spent three films slicing and dicing his way across Japan. He has killed Japan's second-best swordsman. He has no more worlds to conquer. Bleak, but, for a Samurai movie, it's perfect.

Other genres, like fairy tales – perhaps the closest traditional analogy to Star Wars – end with a wedding, as described by folklore scholar Vladimir Propp in his 1928 book, Morphology of the Folktale. That's why the final line of a fairy tale is often, "And they lived happily ever after." Star Wars, like a fairy tale, is supposed to be fun for kids and for the child within the adult. Bad guys lose and are punished, heroes overcome obstacles, and endings promise a brighter future.

Humans understand fertile marriages and children as a promise for the future that reaffirms the value of the present. Yes, heroes die. Yes, we die. But we, and heroes, marry and reproduce. That's the future. That's our hope, our narratological protection against death, meaninglessness, and the void.

The second book of Samuel, which is at least 2,500 years old, contains a stunning depiction of how new life brings new hope. David sins gravely by orchestrating the death of Uriah, a man whose wife, Bathsheba, he lusts after. God says he will punish David by killing the son he had with Bathsheba. David dons sackcloth, fasts and prays, but the child dies anyway. Immediately after his child's death, as the Bible reports with characteristic bluntness, David washes, eats, and has sex with Bathsheba. The fruit of that sex act grows up to be Solomon, a great king.

At the end of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Rey and Kylo Ren, though they had previously been deadly enemies, kiss. After they kiss, Kylo Ren dematerializes. He's not just dead, he's disappeared. The nine-part Star Wars extravaganza ends not with a wedding and a promise of new life, but with a funeral. Rey buries Luke and Leia's light sabers. She then smiles at their hovering ghosts. Luke, as a Jedi, was forbidden attachments. He had no children. Han Solo and Princess Leia's son, Kylo Ren, went to the dark side, killed his father, and dematerialized. Rey is a female lead who can wield a light saber, but she never exercises women's real magic. She never has kids. Star Wars ends in death with no promise of future life. That's nihilistic. 

That's why Horizon and Fly Me to the Moon so delighted me. They are movie-movies. They are crafted for the widest audience. They feature gorgeous people achieving great feats and both feature healthy sexuality and affirmations of human fertility. They are beautiful to look at. They are, God help me for saying this, pro-American, as in they affirm a goodness in the hearts and minds of American people. Yes, both main characters and minor characters do pretty awful things in both movies, but in one there is hope that the good man will best the bad man. In the other, there is hope for human redemption. If going to the movies were not so expensive nowadays, I'd like nothing more than to go right back to the theater and watch both movies again.

I am a thorn in the side of G. Ryan Faith, author of "Taking Aristotle to the Moon and Beyond." Ryan is enraptured by space exploration. I am not. Watching Fly Me to the Moon is the first time in my life I felt anything of what folks like Ryan feel. I've seen other space-related movies like Hidden Figures, Contact, Ad Astra, 2001, and Gravity. In a Smithsonian Air and Space museum, I saw the Space Shuttle Discovery up close and personal. None of this did to me what Fly Me to the Moon did for me. Watching this movie, watching the Vehicle Assembly Building, the largest one-story building in the world, watching all these young guys in white shirts, skinny ties, and browline glasses nervously monitoring moon launches, I was moved in a way that nothing previously, including my online debates with space fans like Ryan, had done. I'm still too earthy to be a space fan, but, during this movie, I felt it.

Fly Me to the Moon scores merely a so-so 66% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Satantango, in contrast, has a 100% rating. I bet it takes way more filmmaking skill to concoct a successful romantic comedy than an eight-minute continuous take of aimless cows. Romantic comedies are like souffles. You need just the right amount of froth leavening just the right amount of substance. Too much substance and the film deflates into embarrassment. Too much froth and the film dissipates into meaninglessness. It doesn't stick to the ribs or the heart. Fly Me to the Moon is in the Goldilocks zone of just right.

Fly Me to the Moon addresses, briefly, the Apollo 1 tragedy. Three astronauts, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee, died in a cabin fire. The best romantic comedies have always included substance – allusions to wider social trends – as well as froth, the funny and romantic stuff. A starving single mother faints in front of her son in It Happened One Night. The film was made in 1934; it was the Depression. Desk Set from 1957 depicts the early use of computers and humans losing their jobs to machines. There's a back-alley abortion attempt, but also laughter, in 1963's Love with the Proper Stranger, a mourning widower in Sleepless in Seattle from 1993, and chain stores wipe out an independent bookshop in You've Got Mail from 1998.

Critics, though, want Fly Me to the Moon to be all froth or all substance, but not a combination. Were they uncomfortable processing the film's brief salute to three heroic Americans who died in service to their country's advance into space? Possibly.

"Earthbound" sniffs the New York Times. "Tonally messy," reports Christy Lemire. "Houston, we have a problem … a mishmash," says the Irish Times. "A communication satellite knocked out of orbit by a meteor," says Peter Howell. "Heavy-handed history lessons ruin the fun," says Eileen Jones. Note that all these bad reviews didn't like the actual NASA history. They just wanted laughs.

The most anti-life review comes from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. This ironically named broadcast has never met a cheap slasher flick it doesn't like. Who knew that taxpayer-funded National Public Radio is staffed by leftist humanitarians thirsty for buckets of blood and onscreen dismemberment? Kristen Meinzer always sounds like she's a a school marm in a Little Rascals episode disciplining Spanky. Meinzer says, "I did not need the romantic stuff in here. I felt like a lot of it was clunky. And frankly, a lot of it just felt overstuffed and unnecessary." Another NPR talking head agrees. "They know people like romance and not for any good reason."

In recent years, the romantic comedy as a genre has been in trouble. Its trouble is about more than the trouble besetting movie-going in general. The romantic comedy is in trouble because sex, men, women, eroticism, relationships, incel boys, girls who think they are boys, the family, and yes love are in trouble. And the above lines are mere drops in the evidentiary bucket. "They" – some conspiratorial overlords controlling movies – "know people like romance and not for any good reason." NPR thinks there's no good reason for romance! There's no good reason why any moviegoer would want to see Scarlett Johansson, her luscious bits jam packed into skin-tight sixties frocks, get it on with Channing Tatum, the very body that has starred in three movies about male stripping!

In Fly Me, Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson) is a cracker jack ad executive. She could sell sand to a desert nomad. Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson) has dirt on Kelly. He blackmails her into compliance. Moe makes it clear that he works for President Richard Nixon and that she cannot refuse. Kelly quits her Manhattan advertising job and travels to Florida. She stops at a diner and Cole Davis (Channing Tatum) enters. The two "meet cute" – a standard rom-com motif. Before departing, Cole blurts out that Kelly is the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. They go their separate ways, but soon meet again. Cole is the Apollo 11 launch director. Kelly's job, under Moe Berkus' direction, is to use her skills to sell the space program to hesitant legislators. Berkus ups his demands. He forces Kelly to stage a fake moon landing, just in case the real moon landing malfunctions.

Kelly's work offends and irritates Cole. She is a morally elastic, charming seductress who always gets her way. He is a by-the-book straight arrow. Cole was also launch director on Apollo 1. Cole is humorless and driven at least partly because of his role in the previous, failed mission.

As Kelly and Cole get closer, Kelly reveals that her widowed mother was a door-to-door con artist. She raised Kelly in this life. Kelly realized that she could use the scams her mother taught her in a successful career in advertising. She thought she had escaped her past till Berkus found her and pressured her to do his bidding. Meeting the dedicated scientists working together for a patriotic goal changed her life, she tells Cole.

At a key moment, a black cat solves many of the film's problems. Dariusz Wolski, a real Polish cinematographer, plays the part of the cameraman for the fake moon landing. As the film ends, happily, Wolski pops the cork on a champagne bottle and says the film's two words of Polish dialogue: "Na zdrowie," or "To your health." And they lived happily ever after.

I'm a heterosexual woman and gazing at Scarlett Johansson's feminine lusciousness for two hours was a terrific way to while away a summer afternoon. She looks like Marilyn Monroe here, but she plays a street smart con artist with a heart of gold, saved by the right guy. Johansson's Kelly shows the grit and savvy of Barbara Stanwyck in Frank Capra's Meet John Doe.

Sadly, Channing Tatum keeps his clothes on, but he's still very good here. He's not the male stripper of the Magic Mike films. Tatum is committed to morphing into a dedicated scientist who gives his all for the space race and to honoring his fallen comrades from Apollo 1.

Many films have tried to capture the zeitgeist of the American sixties. The Kennedy years, the Vietnam war, the societal unrest, but also the ballsy, swaggering, top of the world confidence, the gee-whiz scientific advances, the conviction that Americans could do anything they put their minds to, and that Americans actually were accomplishing things that no one had accomplished before. Fly Me to the Moon doesn't just get the muscle cars, cigarette smoking, Tab and Tang right. It gets the zeitgeist right. It's that feel of the movie, the sum of all the parts working together really well, that made me, for the first time in my life, feel for, if not with, the young engineer guys working their slide rules, gripping their pencils, and staring into space and watching with their hearts in their mouths as their boyhood dreams came true. And I laughed out loud throughout the movie. Again, for me, a perfect marriage of froth and substance.

Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One is a three-hour Western directed by, starring, and co-written by Kevin Costner. It is set in 1861-1865 and in Arizona's San Pedro River Valley and Montana.

Horizon cost $100 million to make; much of that came directly from Kevin Costner. The film bombed at the box office. Costner may never be able to recoup his investment. The release of the second chapter of the proposed four-part series was scheduled for August; that plan has been scrapped. Costner has been making part three since May. It remains to be seen if he will ever be able to make part four.

Horizon is a love-it-or-hate-it movie. Fan reviews at the Internet Movie Database include a lot of nines and tens, insisting that the movie is a "masterpiece," and a lot of threes and fours, insisting that the movie is a botch. Rotten Tomatoes' professional reviewers award Horizon a paltry 48% approval; fans give it 71%.

Horizon has been condemned by both the political left and the political right. Jacobin, a socialist magazine, published a review that contains at least one over-the-top insult per sentence. Reviewer Eileen Jones labels Horizon a "turd," an "outrage," and says she wanted to "torch the theater." Of course she's a socialist so she may hear arson's siren call at all times. We must "unite as a society" and stop Horizon. It is "triumphalist," that is "stupidly celebratory" of white people replacing Native Americans. It is "pollution;" it is "moronically regressive." "Costner clearly likes a world-dominating 'real man.'" Horizon is also bad because it treats its female characters with "reverence."

The conservative National Review also condemned Horizon. The film, says reviewer Armond White, "nails our forebears" – that is, it crucifies them; contrast this with the leftist complaint that the film celebrates them. Whereas the socialist reviewer says that the film elevates manly men, the right-wing reviewer says that the film depicts "toxic masculinity." Horizon is just another "fatuous hippie vision of global conquest." "Horizon demonstrates a bizarre, intellectually lazy way of revising, during the current crisis in patriotism, what was once Hollywood’s most popular genre." Horizon, says White, is every bit as bad as Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project.

I'm sitting here trying to figure out which one of these two reviewers is more nuts, and who, of Eileen Jones or Armond White, I'd least prefer to watch a movie with.

Horizon is not a perfect movie. Its biggest problem is not politics; it is narrative drive. A classic narrative presents a character we can care about who is trying to achieve some goal. No matter how much happens in between, there is a straight line between the first scene and the last. Horizon doesn't work that way. The film is a series of vignettes. Some vignettes are long; some are short. Sometimes characters are onscreen for mere minutes before they are killed. Sometimes there is an obvious connection between one vignette and the next; sometimes the viewer is left to wonder if there is any connection, or if we will ever see the characters from the previous scene again. Perhaps these disconnected stories will resolve themselves in future installments.

I didn't like this aspect of Horizon. I think it would have been a better film if Costner had obeyed the laws of narrative and shaped his film into a more classic plan. Some of the more boring plot lines could have been deleted. I never believed smirky, too-cool-for-school Luke Wilson as a wagon train chief, and nothing could make me care about that wagon train with its prim English immigrant and the cartoonish, troglodyte peeping Toms who spy on her as she bathes naked.

I cared a lot about Hayes Ellison (Kevin Costner), a lone "saddle tramp," prospector, and perhaps retired gunslinger. I cared about Hayes because he is played by Kevin Costner, a charismatic star, and because he is the oldest cast member. Why is a sixty-nine year old man riding, alone, through the Rockies? Why did he kill a man he doesn't know at all to rescue a prostitute he also doesn't know? I will watch the next installment just to find out.

Why do I want you to see Horizon? Because it isn't a movie based on a comic book. Because it depicts real settings rather than special effects fakery. Because one of our major stars cared enough about telling a key American narrative that he was willing to inch toward bankruptcy to do it. Because I think that artists who try to do something different and substantial should be rewarded so that more artists will take similar risks. But I really want you to see it because it is beautiful. John Debney's score offers aural beauty to support the visual beauty onscreen.

There is violence in Horizon, violence so disturbing I had to close my eyes, but someday soon I will sit through all three hours again just for the beauty. The scenes of Costner and Abbey Lee, as a fleeing prostitute named Marigold, wending their way on horseback through the high Rockies, are so beautiful I wondered if individual leaves had been hand-painted. The film's costumes look like they came right out of archival photos or museum dioramas. I love Horizon's dedication to authenticity.

John Ford (1894 – 1973) is widely hailed as one of the most important directors in film history. He was also a very difficult person, notorious for bullying John Wayne; you can get a sense of Ford's irascibility in this interview with Peter Bogdanovich. Ford once introduced himself at a meeting of his fellow top Hollywood directors by saying, "My name is John Ford and I make Westerns," which is kind of like Shakespeare introducing himself at a meeting of writers and saying, "My name is Bill, and I write plays."

Orson Welles is often considered to have made the best movie ever, Citizen Kane. When asked what directors influenced him, Welles replied, "I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford." Ingmar Bergman called him, "The best director in the world." On the other hand, Spike Lee said, "F--- John Ford." Quentin Tarantino said, "I hate John Ford." Both Lee and Tarantino accuse Ford of racism. But fans point out that one of Tarantino's shots is copied from John Ford; see here.

Westerns are one of my least favorite genres. I kept hearing what a great film The Searchers was. To maintain my film fan bona fides, I knew I had to watch it, as a homework assignment. One day I reported to a public library, gritting my teeth, intending to watch, oh, say, the first ten minutes of their VHS copy of The Searchers. Two hours and no bathroom breaks later, I was, slack-jawed, inducted into the cult of John Ford.

John Ford made his first Western in 1917. His last, Cheyenne Autumn, was released in 1964. Costner deserves our gratitude not just for inviting us into the vanished world of our forebears, but also for reviving for us a vanished way of seeing that world. Horizon is a 2024 movie with salutes to John Ford running through it. Costner doesn't just include compositions influenced by Ford. He also handles the slapstick humor that relieves the tension of violent scenes the way that Ford did. Costner, like Ford, uses small touches to humanize characters who appear briefly. His women are, alternately, demure and lusty, civilized and civilizing, and also tough as nails as were Ford's women. That's another reason I want you to see Horizon. It's beautiful, and not in a random way. Costner is presenting his version of the Western landscape, and his version of the Western landscape is a cultural palimpsest, with one hundred plus years of filmmaking just under the surface. I want to watch this movie with someone else, so I can elbow them and say, "Just look at that shot." I want to freeze the frame once it comes out on DVD. And I want to hear the commentary.

The movie isn't just beautiful. I cared about the characters. One of the longer vignettes is a forty-five minute Apache raid on a white settlement. In The Searchers, a comparable Comanche raid is much shorter and much less graphic. Ford's scene, made in 1956 in compliance with the Hays Code, can only suggest what Horizon depicts. Characters Costner has made us care about are killed, one after another. The death of a father and son is particularly poignant. Some survive, but only through great difficulty. I found watching what these characters resorted to to survive harder to watch than some of the deaths.

This lengthy scene is very brave. Both the right-wingers and the left-wingers who savage this movie are wrong. Horizon is not on the side of the settlers and it's not on the side of the Apaches. Costner also shoots poignant scenes in Apache villages. There is a lengthy scene between two White Mountain Apaches. Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) lead the raid. He makes the case for violence. He and his family rely on the land that the whites have built their settlement on. The Apaches need the deer and fish for their food. They need the spot in the river for travel. They can't leave; if they do, other tribes will make war on them. They can't sacrifice the land the whites have built on; if they do, they'll starve. Pionsenay debates with another Apache, who says that violent resistance is futile. There are many whites, there are more coming, and some kind of modus vivendi must be reached.

Costner treats both Apaches and settlers as human beings just like you and me. Just like you and me, they face life or death struggle and make the choices that seem most logical to them at the time. You sympathize with the Apaches, even as you are horrified by the deaths and destruction that, they wrongly think, will guarantee their future. You sympathize with the white settlers, and their conviction that all they are doing is building better lives for themselves and their children.

Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery