September Dawn: Critic Reviews

A plodding and highly questionable history lesson.

The maudlin, grotesque western September Dawn apes Schindler's List in hopes of creatinga Christian Holocaust picture.

Even if one gets past the movie's controversial depictions, there is the matter of its second-rate, made-for-television fare -- the poor battle choreography, the wooden editing and the cheesy writing.

It's waxy Classics Illustrated cinema.

September Dawn has the ham-fisted lyricism of political ads and pharmaceutical commercials.

Disturbingly awful.

What a strange, confused, unpleasant movie this is.

The villainous turns by Jon Voight (as a hard-hearted Mormon bishop) and Terence Stamp (as a bloodthirsty Brigham Young) would have been more fun if they weren't part of such a clumsy campaign to lay this tragedy at the church's doorstep.

The film feels less like historical drama than a venomous religious tract printed on celluloid.

[Director Cain] stops short of calling Osama bin Laden a Mormon sympathizer, but maybe that'll be on the DVD.

The real problem is that September Dawn isn't a very good movie. It moves too much like a public-school history pageant and gives us mono-dimensional characters who speak dialogue that fairly reeks of printer's ink.

This handsome indie Western damningly recounts the 1857 slayings of 120 settlers passing through Utah, but the didactic presentation, grim speechifying and tacked-on love story all signify a less-than-healthy regard for the audience's intelligence.

Why does this film even exist?

It has the chilling certitude of the self-righteous.

[The film] too often feels like a very elaborate episode of Gunsmoke.

The workmanlike craftsmanship of Cain's filmmaking almost (but never quite) smooths over the ham-fisted way he conceives the story.

Predictable, obvious, often silly.

Drama may benefit from attention to history, but history doesn't always make for good drama.

Contriving a faux Romeo and Juliet romance as a point of entry for the audience shows how unimaginative the filmmakers are, and how blandly and uninvolving it plays shows how fairly clueless they are in going about their game plan.

Muddled, sloppy, and obfuscating.

An already thin veneer of historical truth wears off fairly quickly in this surprisingly dull and melodramatic low-budget western.

For all the guns fired in the film, [director] Cain aims the largest one at his foot-and pulls the trigger again and again.

It's a toss-up as to whether September Dawn is more offensive as history, as allegory or simply as lousy self-important filmmaking.