Kevin Costner sets out to conquer the West again

Critique Western by Kevin Costner, with Kevin Costner, Sienna Miller, Sam Worthington (United States, 3h01). In theaters July 3 ★★☆☆☆

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The news delighted us about the return to the cinema, in front of and behind the camera, of Kevin Costner, the last Hollywood cowboy with Clint Eastwood, whose previous production, the beautiful “Open Range”, dates back to 2003. Here he is again with a project of his own excess that he has been mulling over for ten years: a fresco in four chapters of three hours each (two have been filmed) on the conquest of the West, supposedly guaranteed without historical revisionism, self-financed by him to the tune of 100 million dollars by mortgaging his Santa Barbara estate.

With its approach to an American territory that seems untouched by any previous gaze, its fragmented narrative that multiplies the characters and its sequence of an attack on a village by Apaches seen from inside a home, the first hour deliberately and with a certain panache loses us in the disorder of a colonization in embryo. An hour is also the time we have to wait for Costner to arrive on screen and, with him, the cinematic limits of what seems to be the pilot of a mini-series. The actor-director-screenwriter-producer wants to embrace too much (the collective and the individual, the pioneers, the scoundrels, the women, the Indians), lacks breath and gives little to the film. Verdict on the next… episodes?