HOMESTEAD - Mark Reviews Movies

Homestead, Angel Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 19, 2024

Back in the day, studios would at least wait for their television shows to fail before turning a pilot episode or some combination of episodes into a movie. They'd also have the sense to air those cobbled-together movies on television. Why bring this up at the start of a review of Homestead, a movie receiving a fairly sizeable theatrical release? Well, that's because this is basically the pilot episode for a TV series, which an actor proudly announces will be available to people (for an additional cost, of course) as soon as they've finished watching the movie.

This is either great or terrible marketing, even if it does feel dishonest. That's not even mentioning the strange pay-it-forward element of the marketing for the movie and show, which seems as if it would have a distinct shape if one followed the path from the top of the process down its ever-widening expanse. It's like a triangle, basically, but since real people and real money are involved, that shape should probably be in three dimensions. There's definitely a particular word for a three-dimensional triangle that might better describe this type of marketing plan, but we'll leave it at that.

As for the movie itself, it's a TV pilot, to be sure, featuring an increasing number of characters, setups, and conflicts that might be promising if the filmmakers (some of them named beneath a "created by" credit, which is a big clue about the movie's origin and purpose) saw them through to the end. They can't here, of course, because there's more of this story to be told later and in a different medium.

What we get from the premise-establishing movie, though, isn't exactly engaging on its own, despite a crackerjack opening. It follows a pair of brothers from an unnamed country on a boat. They're excited to be approaching their destination, and then, a helicopter flies overhead and orders the sailors to turn around immediately. That's when one of the brothers goes below deck and sets up some equipment, only for the camera to pull back to reveal nuclear warning signs on the rig.

It's a bomb, which detonates and causes mass casualties in nearby California, mass blackouts throughout the region, and mass panic across the country. This is a nightmare scenario, sending a bunch of characters we'll eventually sort of meet toward a manor on a vast expanse of land in the Rocky Mountains to take shelter and wait out whatever help—if any—might be coming from the government.

The place, called "Homestead," is owned by Ian Ross (Neal McDonough), who has been preparing for such a situation, and now that it has arrived, he and his family, wife Jenna (Dawn Olivieri) and daughter Claire (Olivia Sanabia), also have about a dozen people to help with farming and other essential chores. They also have private security by way of a team of former special forces soldiers led by Jeff Eriksson (Bailey Chase), who brings his own family, wife Tara (Kearran Giovanni) and their three children, to the ranch.

There are several more characters of some note here, too, but to mention them might give one impression that they're important to this story. They're not, since some of them don't turn up again until the second or third act to offer a little more conflict that will go unexplored before the end of the movie. One who seems quite vital is Jeff and Tara's adopted daughter Georgie (Georgiana White), who draws a mushroom cloud a couple hours before the nuclear detonation, and a little highlight reel of clips from the show suggests she definitely will be important later—if anyone cares enough to follow through on the continuing material after such an anticlimax of a movie.

This is a bold gamble on the part of director Ben Smallbone and the movie's trio of screenwriters (Phillip Abraham, Leah Bateman, and Ben Kasica)—to tease something somewhat intriguing, having to do with potentially spiritual visions (The material's religious angle comes out in a big, unexpected way about halfway through), but only to do so after the movie's story is technically finished. That story feels undercooked, given that the number of characters is too many for them to be developed in less than two hours, that the story basically has them arguing the same debate between self-preservation and altruism over and over, and that little of consequence happen between the explosive opening and a hastily contrived shootout at the end.

Homestead, then, becomes a very strange affair, caught between storytelling and advertising. By the end, it feels as if the latter part has won.

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