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The actual event involved the murder of a group of 137 people from Arkansas who had stopped in Utah on their way to California. Approximately 40 miles from Cedar City, a group of Paiute Indians and local settlers who belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints attacked the travelers. Some of the attackers later offered the Arkansas emigrants safe passage to Cedar city but instead killed all but the youngest children in the party.

Only the leader of the attackers, John Doyle Lee (Jon Gries, "Napoleon Dynamite"), an adopted son of Brigham Young, was ever brought to justice, nearly 20 years after the crime.

Historians have disagreed over whether Young ordered the attack, tried to prevent it or was unaware until it was too late. As a filmmaker, Cain has the option of reaching his own conclusions about how the Mormon Church behaved in 1857. As a result he has created questionable history and boneheaded drama.

A logical decision might be to focus the film on Lee or somebody in his party. It might have been interesting to examine if he was simply a bloodthirsty madman or if he thought the attack might stave off Federal troops from Utah territory.

Instead, Cain and co-writer Carole W. Schutter focus on an implausible love story between a young Mormom named Jonthan Samuelson (Trent Ford) and an Arkansas woman named Emily Hudson (Tamara Hope). Their match is as unconvincing as Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman in "Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones" and a little bit sillier.

Opposing the attraction is Jonathan's intolerant father Jacob (Jon Voight). Jacob is the local Bishop who also serves as a secular authority and assumes any non-Mormon heading through the area must have ill intent.

Schutter and Cain paint all of their characters in broad strokes, so the performances range from stiff to vein-bursting hysteria. The senseless deaths of the Mountain Meadows victims are dramatic enough, so we don't need the clumsily florid prose that stumbles out of the actors' mouths.

Try to keep a straight face when you hear an earnest thespian bellow, "Don't die! You can't die, because if you die, I die!" Even normally terrific performers like Voight and Terrance Stamp, who plays Young, recite their lines as if they were paid by volume. Voight's raspy voice prevents him from reaching the annoying crescendos that Stamp reaches, so he comes out slightly better.

Stamp's lines reportedly come from Young's actual speeches, but they often seem like digressions instead of part of the story. Young never interacts with a single character in the rest of the film, so he becomes more of bogeyman instead of a convincing character.

Cain's best known film is the forgettably shoddy western "Young Guns." Nothing he has made before indicates he has the ability to craft a story like this subtly enough to be convincing or even compelling.

Early in the movie, he cross cuts between the Arkansas party's grateful, gentle prayer with the hate-filled ranting of Jacob Samuelson. It's an attempt to make viewers sympathetic to the victims, as if their needless deaths weren't already tragic.

“September Dawn” has had Washington pundits talking for months. Thanks to a cheap production (boy, Alberta doesn't look much like Utah) and even cheaper thinking, anyone who has seen the movie knows that there’s nothing to discuss.

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=16161&reviewer=382
originally posted: 08/24/07 17:00:00
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