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Kevin Costner is an expert on the cinema. Particularly when it comes to the finest Westerns, Kevin Costner is an expert. He’s been in a few, after all. After starring in films like Dances with Wolves, Wyatt Earp, and Silverado, he continued. He has long been a leading man in one of the top TV shows now airing, and the Horizon release date will see the debut of his new Western.
In the neo-Western series Yellowstone, Costner plays the grouchy patriarch John Dutton. The drama series, which is set in Montana near Yellowstone National Park, combines old and contemporary ideas to create a stunning and even perverse “ranch opera.”
Although we have yet to learn whether the main Yellowstone cast member will return for the premiere of Yellowstone season 5 part 2, we continue to have faith in him and his knowledge of Westerns. He has been outspoken about what makes the genre challenging and why it is so difficult to master.
“Westerns specifically, they can look really dull,” he said [via CBS]. “They can look obvious. They’re hard to make, and that’s the problem. It’s like, it’s hard to make a Western that you can relate to.”
He’s correct. You could begin to see a trend when you think about the top films in the genre. A vast desert, perhaps some tumbleweeds…The characteristics that made the Western world so great have all been stereotypicalized.
But Taylor Sheridan, who created Yellowstone, has a talent for fusing the old with the modern. This is one of the things that makes Yellowstone (and many of the other finest Taylor Sheridan TV shows and films) so fantastic. Additionally, both the primary Yellowstone series and its spin-offs have one outstanding visual quality.
Maybe it was because Yellowstone was once meant to be a motion picture. The thriller series now stands out not just from its competition on tiny screens but also from other contemporary Westerns because to the way it looks and feels.
There is a sense of accessibility that some of the classics sometimes lack, even though it would be difficult to “relate” to the Duttons given their immense riches and capacity to become involved in murder attempts, kidnappings, and a never-ending stream of adversaries. The core of this series is a family story with elements of politics and law. This makes it by far one of the greatest examples of the genre we have today, especially when mixed with the gorgeous Montana countryside captured via a cinematic lens.