September Dawn (2007)

September Dawn is one of those movies that have a good, even noble concept, which utterly fails in the execution. The historical event that this movie is based around is obscured by its ham-fisted dialogue and poor script. Which is a shame because this truly is an event that the majority of Americans don’t know about and it deserves a much better movie.

The movie is about a real life massacre of settlers traveling through Utah, supposedly perpetrated by Mormon extremists in a place called Mountain Meadows. Utah militiamen belonging to the Mormon Church killed hundred and twenty men, woman and children. Although there is some debate about whether senior members of the church knew about the attack, this movie takes the view that they were involved in issuing the orders to attack the settlers. Set amongst this tragedy is the love story of two young adults, John the son of Bishop Jacob Samuelsson and Elizabeth, one of the settlers.

One of the biggest problems with this movie is that it is obviously an attempt to hang responsibility of the massacre on the heads of the Mormon Church. The settlers are almost universally portrayed as innocent God fearing Christian folk who are looking for a little piece of heaven in California, while the Mormons are almost universally portrayed as hateful bigots who want revenge for what happened to them in Missouri. It really hampers the telling of the story when the main characters cannot be fully-fledged human beings and instead are used as ciphers for propaganda. I’m not saying that I don’t believe the leadership knew nothing of this attack, I don’t really know which way or the other, only that it fails in its attempt to create interesting characters. I’m not really interested in its historical accuracy, only in its merits as a film.

Given that the characters are not much more than caricatures, it is understandable that the actors give little life to their roles. None of them move beyond their roles as innocent settler or villainous Mormon. Even John Voigt fails to bring anything to his role. Heck, at least in The Code Morgan Freeman is interesting to listen to. This a very paint by numbers script that does not serve as an effective delivery for the real tragic events that happen in the film.

About the only good thing I can say about it is that it does bring to light a historical event I knew nothing about… that and it gave Dean Cain some work. Watch this movie if you’re interested in finding out more about a historical event that is not in the history books. Otherwise, I’d avoid it.

I bought this movie as part of a 3-1 deal at IGA for $5.99 CDN.