This Fourth of July weekend, pour one out for the Kevin Costner fan in your life (or yourself, if you’re a Costnerhead). We’ve recently passed the one-year anniversary of Costner’s magnum opus Horizon: An American Saga opening in theaters — or at least its first installment. A second chapter is complete (it has screened at a select few festivals), but there’s no release date in sight, whether in theaters or on streaming, and the in-progress third movie (to say nothing of apparent plans for a fourth) seems to be in limbo. It seems likely that the second chapter of Horizon will eventually surface, but while you wait, one service has HBO Maximized the amount of Costner western vistas available to stream with the addition of a four-hour cut of his Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves, also known as the likely reason Horizon exists in the first place. If you haven’t seen Costner’s biggest hit as a director, didn’t know about the existence of a longer cut, or simply want to revisit an old Best Picture winner, the Fourth of July holiday weekend seems like a great occasion to settle in for a Costner epic. (And if you don’t have the full four hours to spare, the original Oscar-winning cut is available, too!)

Why Watch Dances with Wolves Tonight?

Back in the early ’90s, Costner was at his movie-star peak, and in the midst of a stunning run of box office successes that included Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, JFK, and The Bodyguard, the damn fool went and won a Best Director Oscar for his neo-western Dances with Wolves. As with almost every Best Picture winner in history, it didn’t take long for Wolves to build up a post-Oscar reputation as officially unworthy; in this case, Costner was particularly resented for being yet another actor-turned-Oscar-winning-director who got a trophy before a master like Martin Scorsese, whose Goodfellas was the 1990 Oscar nominee to really stand the test of time (not least because it didn’t win). Besides which, isn’t Dances with Wolves another story about non-white people told specifically from a white guy’s perspective? Didn’t its fellow Oscar-winning western Unforgiven better engage with the complexities of the Old West and how those very American myths perpetuated by movie westerns conflict with the realities of history?

Well, yes, Goodfellas and Unforgiven are both better movies than Dances with Wolves. They’re also better movies than… most movies, and Costner’s surprisingly gentle and unhurried western has actually aged pretty well, all things considered. It’s especially notable that in the wake of Costner’s unofficial branding as an avatar of small-c conservatism, Dances with Wolves is almost hippie-ish in its embrace of an anti-army, pro-peace perspective.

Costner plays John Dunbar, a Union soldier in the Civil War whose unexpected battlefield victory leads to his choice of assignments. He chooses a remote outpost in Colorado, which through a series of odd circumstances becomes his and his alone; no other soldiers arrive to fortify it. Eventually, he makes peace with a local Sioux tribe and becomes accepted into their culture, romancing a white woman who has been adopted into the tribe. Eventually, he fights with the Sioux against the U.S. Army, who are trying to round up the tribes.

It’s a simple story, which Costner spreads out over a leisurely three hours in his original cut, and four hours in the extended version. It should be noted that the latter isn’t officially Costner’s “director’s cut,” but rather a version that was released in London theaters a year after the film’s initial debut. Costner promoted it at the time, but has since said that he didn’t work on it directly (apart from, you know, directing all of the footage that was incorporated back into the longer cut). Producer Jim Wilson described the longer cut in an interesting way, saying that it essentially fulfills a function similar to a sequel: Additional time with characters and storylines that audiences liked, only integrated back into the film rather than expanded into a second. Even if he didn’t participate in the re-editing process, Costner seems to like this idea in principle; Horizon was clearly designed as one long thing, not a single western that might later inspire follow-ups.

The general consensus is that the “shorter” (still three-hour) Dances with Wolves is the better-paced version, but part of the movie’s beauty is how it doesn’t depend on heedless momentum and can therefore accommodate extra character moments and scene-setting without feeling too bloated. In both versions, Costner lets sequences and character developments breathe; all of the westerns he’s directed himself are on the longer side, but it’s Wolves that feels most sustained in its poetry. For all of the white-savior talk (and it’s not totally invalid), what comes through the movie is a feeling of genuine respect and reverence for the Sioux people, and the ways that a white soldier might find them more relatable than the culture he was raised on. So many picks for Independence Day-themed movies focus on the heroism and sacrifice of the U.S. military; Dances with Wolves feels equally All-American by giving screen time and empathy to people who were here before settlers, colonists, and various soldiers marched through the country. Costner has starred in plenty of movies dealing with both the promise of America and the thorny, complicated realities of the country. But Dances with Wolves may be his best tribute to this country.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.

Stream Dances with Wolves Extended Cut on HBO Max