The “strange, confused, unpleasant movie” Roger Ebert awarded zero stars: “Isn’t it sickening?”
It takes a special kind of bad movie for the person reviewing it to not even award it a rating on whatever system they use, especially when that person is Roger Ebert and they’ve reviewed more films than most.
By his own estimation, Ebert passed judgment on at least 10,000 features, and only around 60 of them were given a zero-star rating. To put that into context, using those numbers as the baseline, that means only around 0.6% of every movie he ever saw professionally was deemed so awful that it didn’t merit a single star.
Obviously, that means any picture that failed to make the grade comfortably ranked among the most egregious affronts to cinema that the legendary critic had ever laid eyes on, and he had serious issues with a historical epic that used one of American history’s darkest moments as the backdrop to a fictional love story that was handled with absolutely no skill, style, or taste.
The ‘Mountain Meadows Massacre’ of 1857 saw at least 120 people killed at the hands of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, when an organised militia attacked and killed men, women, and children travelling on a wagon train from Arkansas to California. It’s been depicted onscreen many times over the years, but as far as Ebert was concerned, it’s never been done worse than in co-writer and director Christopher Cain’s 2007 effort, September Dawn.
Melding fact with fiction, Jon Voight takes top billing as a Mormon bishop who allows a band of settlers to stay on his land, all while he harbours sinister intentions for them, including the woman his son has fallen in love with. Not only did he hate the movie, Ebert abhorred what he interpreted as Cain trying to draw parallels between Mountain Meadows and 9/11.
“What a strange, confused, unpleasant movie this is,” he lamented. “The problem with allegories is that you can plug them in anywhere. There isn’t anything to be gained in telling the story this way. It generates bad feelings on all sides, and at a time when Mormons are at pains to explain why they are Christians, it underlines the way these Mormons consider all Christians to be ‘gentiles.'”
“Wasn’t there a more thoughtful and insightful way to consider this historical event? Or how about a different event altogether?” he asked rhetorically. Bizarrely, and in direct conflict with his position as someone who was tasked to try and find any shreds of good in otherwise irredeemable films, Ebert was glad that September Dawn sucked as hard as it did.
“If there is a concealed blessing, it is that the film is so bad,” he explained. “Jon Voight, that gifted and versatile actor, is here given the most ludicrous and unplayable role of his career.” As for the supporting cast, there’s a character that “can only be described as a horse whisperer,” which left a bad taste in Ebert’s mouth for trying to sweeten the sour.
“Isn’t it sickening that the plot stirs in some sugar?” he queried of said horse whisperer and two shoehorned romances. “I am trying as hard as I can to imagine the audience for this movie,” he pondered. “Every time I make progress, it scares me.” Since September Dawn lost a fortune at the box office and got Voight on the Razzies shortlist for ‘Worst Supporting Actor’, Ebert must have been relieved to discover that there wasn’t an audience at all.
