Written by Costner and Jon Baird, “Chapter 1” features uneven lines of action that jump across the map, from the southwest to the Territory of Wyoming. In one section, bad men with good cheekbones, their dusters trimmed with animals skins à la Gladiatorial Rome, chase after a righteously violent woman (Jena Malone in a lively, credible turn). In time, they end up in one of those frontier towns with muddy streets and desperate characters, a sinkhole where Hayes rides in with some gold and exits with Marigold (Abbey Lee), a lady of the evening (and afternoon). In another section, Luke Wilson leads a wagon train peopled with tough Americans, Laplander goons and two British twits itching for some punishment.
The story line that revs up the action centers on the settlement, a riverfront hamlet on a ribbon of green that winds through the desert and has attracted the attention of a tribe of White Mountain Apache led by Tuayeseh (Gregory Cruz). Soon after the movie opens, the settlers are swinging their partners to fiddles like good John Ford folk; not long after, many are dead, cut down by Apaches. Among the survivors are the newly widowed, impeccably manicured Frances Kittredge (Sienna Miller) and her daughter, Elizabeth (Georgia MacPhail), who take refuge in the fort. There, they meet a first lieutenant, Trent Gephart (Sam Worthington), a thoughtful soul who refers to Native Americans as Indigenous.
The word Indigenous has been used to describe Native Americans for centuries, yet its casual use, by a white officer no less, jumps out. Its use here announces Gephart’s sensitivities, and it telegraphs Costner’s own concerns. He remains best known, of course, for his epic 1990 western “Dances With Wolves,” which he also directed and starred in, and involves a white Union lieutenant’s relations with some Lakotas. Notably, “Dances” opens in the 1860s, when most of “Chapter 1” is set. At this point in Costner’s latest saga, though, the war and its fissures remain largely implied, agonies hovering right outside the story’s boundaries.
Instead, the violence that defines “Chapter 1,” giving its sprawl some sharp contours, takes place during two separate massacres. The first occurs at night in Horizon on an evening when much of the town has gathered for the dance. A group of Apache, who live in the region and want to preserve their ancestral home, destroy the town in a conflagration that Costner films intimately and, for the most part, with an objective point of view. By contrast, the second massacre — orchestrated by a posse of Horizon survivors and bounty hunters against a different tribe — is largely seen through the eyes of a white boy. He’s a survivor of Horizon and as this slaughter unfolds, he weeps, dropping his gaze and falling to his knees.