Set in 1857 near Cedar City, Utah, and based on actual events, September Dawn features a clan of Westbound, wagon train settlers from Missouri who experience an unfortunate encounter with an unforgiving Mormon community. The group is led by zealot Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight), the “bishop and chief” of what writer-director Christopher Cain fashions as a fire-and-brimstone sect on the order of Al-Quaeda.  Complete with promises of celestial fortunes for leading lambs to the slaughter on September 11, 1857, the Mormons took 120 settlers’ lives during a bloody battle known as the Mountain Meadows massacre.   

While the settlers were given brief sanctuary on the land and as pious folk were easily led astray by seeming goodwill, the Mormons, under the leadership of Samuelson and the tutelage of Brigham Young (Terence Stamp) himself, orchestrated a plan to murder the “Gentiles” they became convinced had brought a curse to the land.  Complicating matters, a pair of star-crossed lovers—young settler Emily Hudson (Tamara Hope) and the bishop’s freethinking son, Jonathan (Trent Ford, impressive)—fall instantly in love.  

September Dawn, an intentionally polarizing film spiked with modern relevance in its tale of the spoils of religious extremism, finds its footing in its love story yet is ultimately betrayed by its thematic simplicity, often feeling play-acted and contrived, missing the sweep the material needs to be epic and the complexity it needs to be intelligent.    

Still, Trent Ford and Tamara Hope exude a believable romantic charge, delivering affecting performances in both their budding romantic moments as well as a powerfully acted dénouement.  The rest of the cast is an oddly mixed bag, from heavyweights Stamp and Voight chewing the scenery to Dean Cain and Lolita Davidovich in small supporting roles.    

The real problem with September Dawn is the film’s overt and heavy-handed agenda, a blanket determination by writer-director Cain’s dot-to-dot, good guys and bad guys portrait of fanaticism run amok, on September 11, no less.  One laughable early sequence cross-cuts two converse religious sermons into a heroes and villains ideology Cain clearly embraces, setting the tone for a film whose “provocative” and “controversial” subject becomes literal agitprop, sledgehammered with broad strokes of good and evil set against a classic western backdrop, better mounted than it deserves to be.    

A confused but intermittently watchable film, September Dawn ultimately indicts the Mormons proper as much as the concept of cult-like mass murder. Whether Cain intended this is anyone’s guess. When the climactic showdown takes place, much of it on the backs of Native Americans who were manipulated by the Mormons to lead the charge, Cain turns the film into a ballet of carnage, replete with “honest” shots of children being shot through their hearts and defenseless victims cowering for their lives.  Yet oddly, we have more investment in whether the young lovers will live happily ever after.  And both actors work wonders, selling their latter-day Romeo and Juliet with appealing sensitivity and heart.