Despite the often excellent, old-fashioned western technique, the second, three-hour-plus part of Costner's passion project is just as ponderous and confusingly disjointed as the first.

There's a lot to say and yet very little to write about Kevin Costner's neglected "Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 2," the second of a planned four installments in his sprawling, multi-stranded Western, which, after the muted reception of "Chapter 1" at Cannes, plays out of competition on the final day of Venice. Doubling down on the first chapter's varied triumphs but also its serious structural problems, it's an exercise in contradictions: packed with incident but strangely understated; filled with new and returning characters but largely lacking in compelling characterization; and, at more than three hours long, simply too long a film to be so jarringly abrupt.

It’s hardly a surprise that it picks up where the last one left off, since the last one left off with, essentially, a preview reel for Part Two. Viewers baffled by the final frame of that montage — a lingering close-up of a mustachioed Giovanni Ribisi, who otherwise doesn’t appear — will have that mystery at least partially solved when “Chapter 2” opens in Chicago, with Ribisi’s shady Mr. Pickering convincing some local farmers to invest in the land-grab scheme advertised on all those flyers, encouraging settlers to move to the bucolic frontier idyll known as Horizon. All of this is narrated by Georgie (Aidan McCann), the young son of one of the investors, with a lilting Scottish accent reminiscent of Anna Paquin’s in “The Piano,” and a lovely sense of dry irony that makes it a little sad that we’ll never hear from him again. Instead, we, like everyone else, are heading west.

As before, the two best-developed storylines are the wagon train storyline, which centers on the grim trials of Ella Hunt's Mrs. Proctor, and the continuing adventures of Sienna Miller's Frances, whose tentative romance with Union Army officer Trent (Sam Worthington) ends when he leaves to fight. Both stories offer some insight into the plight of women in the pioneer west, with Mrs. Proctor suffering sexual slavery after her husband's murder, to the shamefully complicit silence of the rest of the wagoners. Meanwhile, Frances, disappointed by Trent's departure ("War's a good refuge for you men who don't know your own business," she sharply observes), insists on moving back to her burnt-out farm with her daughter Elizabeth (Georgia McPhail) to await the arrival of her late husband's widower, whom she is expected to marry. When these storylines finally converge between Will Patton’s gruff, good-natured patriarch and his headstrong, tomboyish daughter Diamond (Isabelle Fuhrman), it’s possible to glimpse, for a second, an overarching plan for the “Horizon” project that’s otherwise barely discernible.