A Brave New World Order | Homestead (2024) Movie (Arguable) Review
I watched Homestead (2024) so you don’t have to 😎
I LiveSkeet film reviews over on BlueSky, and then piece them together with commentary to make my full reviews here on Medium before they go to Letterbox’d. Please subscribe anywhere/everywhere you can for more of my shenanigans…
Feels like I hear a lot about the Culture War(s) these day(s), as much after moving to the Pacific Northwest as when I lived in Texas. I hear a lot of rumblings and murmurings of folks who are resistant to ‘woke’ media and this wild, unfounded claim that going woke equals going broke.
It’s all patently a lot of nonsense, and verifiably untrue on its face. I calculated in my Mufasa: The Lion King review that the Disney live-action remakes (perhaps Ground Zero for Go-Woke-Go-Broke agitation) have grossed more than $10 billion, netting more than $7 billion. Without a single spark of artistry or creativity between the lot of them. Pretty good work if you can get it.
So, no, that go-woke-go-broke agitating is — I guess — largely aspirational. Not the world we live in.
Neither is the world of the film. They may well be the same world, in which strong, grim, white men are always, always right, even though nobody listens to them, especially not mouthy, young, biracial interlopers trying to fuck their daughters or the endless parade of good, faithful women who are just so confounded by the bleak realities of this apocalyptic wasteland world that they lose their goddamn heads and argue with their husbands, even in front of other people — though not often, obviously.
They’re good, Christian women who stray, not godless, heathen jezebels from the coast who speak to their men like their best girlfriends at a drunken girls’ night.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
So — having seen literally everything showing at any AMC anywhere near me — I came to Homestead. I knew from having seen a post or two on BlueSky, and just looking at Neal McDonough’s big, dumb, white head on the poster more or less what I was in for.
I actually resented the coverage suggesting I was a moron or sucker to even find myself in the audience.
Let me be clear — I see movies for free. Homestead and Angel Studios, plus filmmaker Ben Smallbone, received not a dime from the Cook & Cats, Co. household.
I was just here to take in their presumably shitty movie and see what they have to offer, in the event they get to secede like they all want, and they’re tasked with entertaining themselves without the liberal elites they all hate so much, and the values we’re always allegedly trying to shove down their throats.
Bring it on, alties. Let’s see whatcha got.
The (alleged) movie opens with two swarthy, non-white men on a boat. That’s not how I’d ordinarily describe it, but that’s probably how the screenwriter would describe it.
The two men, one younger and one older, are there to detonate some kind of thermonuclear device and devastate the West Coast, the first in the hit parade of ‘that’ll-show-them’ comeuppances libs get in this pitiful, little hissy-fit of a movie.
They’re buzzed by a Coast Guard helicopter, or at least, we’re led to believe they are. In hilariously make-do fashion, the production did not have access to a helicopter or B-roll of helicopters.
There’s so little helicopter in this helicopter fly-by, it feels like maybe Helicopters, collectively, filed a very-enforceable, draconian restraining order, and no one involved with this film can even be within three hundred yards of a helicopter. That’s how not a helicopter the thing attacking them is (it’s more like a Sam Raimi practical effect from the mid-eighties, where we’re in the POV of a helicopter, in an abstract sort of way).
It’s not the last time this movie dances with not-helicopters, either. There is a scene later where we’re led to believe we’re seeing three helicopters fly in formation across the sky, but it looks more like they had access to digital assets (Clip-Art, maybe) of enormous insects or flies, and they show those in place of helicopters with some soundbed rotor noise and hope nobody notices.
Nobody will. Nobody is seeing this movie.
There were probably a dozen unhappy souls in attendance that stayed until the end of the movie. They got quiet when the house lights came down, and settled in for a movie during the trailers (which included three other Angel Studio films, the highly-suspect, alleged film distribution studio responsible for Homestead), but then when the film began, little murmured conversations started up once again, because the sound design was so bad that the people watching weren’t sure whether there was something wrong with the projection or sound system.
No footfalls. No crunching of leaves. No blowing of wind. Just the sound of leaden, monotonous voices produced by actors in cheap sound booths — not together or at the same time — and NOTHING else. It was bizarre, and the other audience members didn’t know how to respond to it.
They basically talked throughout the film openly, as though the house lights had come up, and we were at intermission, but they did this while the movie was playing up on the screen.
They did this because it’s maybe the most boring, self-pitying, dumb, alt-right parable that’s ever been committed to the screen.
I’m going to refrain from making jokes about showrunner (I say showrunner because the filmmaker responsible for this is also the showrunner for the television show, which Jesse Hutch positively pleads with us to watch after the closing credits of the movie) Ben Smallbone’s name, because it appears to be his legal last name he was born with, and — unlike literally everything that happens in this movie — that isn’t his fault.
Like any conservative ideologue, it’s impossible to tell exactly to what extent he’s serious or trolling. I don’t know that they know.
“Are you for fucking real?!” is a fair question to pose to literally any piece of this movie. And I don’t know how seriously we’re meant to take any of the wish-fulfillment elements of this allegorical plot. Again, I don’t know that the writer knows the answer to these questions.
I started calling the arguable protagonist of the picture, Jeff Eriksson (played by Bailey Chase of daytime soap fame; no shade there, though he’s flat and low-effort in this performance, likely understanding the assignment perfectly), the White/Right Guy, because — aside from his obligatory, vague, militaristic-defense-security background — those are his two characteristics on the page. He’s never not both of those things.
The narrative allure of post-apocalyptic stories is that the setting serves to reveal humanity as it really is, when the artifices of society and modernity are stripped away. In a parallel way, some of the sociological allure of these specific, conservative post-apocalyptic wish-fulfillment narratives is that they reveal their fans as they really are, to any of the rest of us who happen to be looking.
To that end, I’ve clipped some Google Reviews that explain in some detail what about the film resonated with them and why. Because — from an objective strictly-filmmaking standpoint, there’s almost fucking nothing in this movie; plot, character growth, even art design or action set-pieces — this movie doesn’t have those things.
So what are they judging it by, and how are they finding it a four- or five-star experience in so doing?
I cannot for the life of me parse what Harry thinks of Angel Studios. This movie is an Angel Studios movie, which means it’s a really good movie (it isn’t), but has a Christian message in it (I’d argue it very much does, though I don’t know why the conjunction ‘but’ was used… does that imply that most really good movies don’t have Christian messages? True, but a weird point to make…). He’s happy to report that the religious stuff is mostly ignored (I really don’t think it is — this movie is rife with calls to the faithful and knowing nods that anyone who’s read a book in the western canon will know are references to scripture), so… what DOES this guy want in a movie? Shove Jesus down our throats, but only really fast in the last five minutes?
Also, not to disagree with Harry, but do worry about getting preached at. I grew up in the church, so I’m all too accustomed to sitting uncomfortably for an hour and a half and being preached at (or, sometimes, about), but this tested my tolerance and patience quite a bit.
The ‘pay it forward’ “cause” Grace makes reference to is the aforementioned PSA from Jesse “Hutch” Hutch, in which he all but drops to his knees and begs anyone left in the theatre to scan the QR code and pay this movie and the show (“It already exists…” he says about fourteen times) forward to others who need to hear the message.
I want you to imagine this kind of ending after, say, the upcoming James Gunn Superman reboot, or Nosferatu or A Complete Unknown. Credits have rolled and the second or third guy on the call sheet (or lady) suddenly comes onscreen next to a giant QR code, and says that thank you so much, firstly, for doing the good and important work of sitting through the preceding movie, and also, your work is not done. If you don’t scan this QR code and start sending it to your friends, this movie might die.
It’s unthinkable, because it’s so shamefully amateurish and classless.
The general timbre of the alt-right movement is shamelessness and saying the quiet part out loud, though, so — given the film’s financial prospects and market — it’s probably a canny, savvy move… if you entirely reject the idea of having any class or comporting yourself as though you’ve been there before.
I’m struggling with the lesson to take away from this one. It’s a bad movie, obviously. One star or whatever. Who cares? By the way, I’ve read that the production budget for this film was $8 million, and if that is true, several people need to go to prison. It’s not remotely on the screen.
I did tweet several times that I was having a lot of fun with the movie, and I actuallty was. I (to a very small extent) live in fear of a The Birth of a Nation, conservative-rallying-call piece of content, that unites, inspires and radicalizes the right even further.
So from that mindset, this was a huge relief. In a sense, I was worried (again: not very much, but a nonzero amount) about a thermonuclear strike, and I just saw with absolute clarity that their best guys haven’t yet figured out how to make the trebuchet work (most of them can’t spell it).
Maybe most telling is the women and the way they’re scripted. I didn’t clock whether it passed the Bechdel Test, but Alison Bechdel wouldn’t have made it through the first ten minutes of this movie for a thousand other reasons (she’s still very much alive, so I oughtn’t to speak for her, except I’m pretty goddamn sure she wouldn’t approve of Homestead’s choices for and about its women characters). The depiction of women is well beyond deplorable and regressive.
There is a pervading attitude of ‘women are fucking weird, but I guess we do need them, don’t we?’ They’re baffling, indecipherable necessary-evils, and often represent incursions of leftist or progressive values, which the men adopt only when absolutely necessary to keep getting laid. It would seem. No one — man or woman — has any real interiority, though, so it’s impossible to say for certain.
Again, I think it’s fair to read this as a sort of adolescent, wish-fulfillment fanfiction for the alt-right, and the world as these men see it, or wish it to be, is so bleak. They’d have us camped out in disconnected, little fiefs — each with its own Great (White) Man running it with an iron fist.
These people cry out for a king — though ironically, it was a bad idea when the people in their Book they bang on about so much did it, just as much as it’s a bad idea now.
Some people never learn. I get the feeling that Ben Smallbone would have happily made a golden calf for the evangelical audience of the day, but what a shitty, dumb-looking, boring calf sculpture it would have been, if this movie is anything to judge by. Complete with a textured QR code on the calf’s ass that instructs you to pass worship of the golden idol forward to other Israelites you know who need to hear this vital, important message.
What’s maybe most surprising — and which perhaps shouldn’t surprise me, at all — is how little passion there is in this ostensible passion project. It’s lazy, cynical and rotten with the sentiment that the dumb assholes who want this movie will like it and support it, regardless of its quality.
And they’re right! So why not be cynical? If that’s your audience, I can’t imagine it’s easy to be idealistic about creating art for them.
To say Homestead lacks polish is a hilarious understatement. At one point, a guerilla-radio figure we only ever hear over the airwaves (meaning the actor is recording his lines in a sound booth, and the cost of having him read it a second time is virtually nil) reads off a list of cities on fire, and it includes Amarillo from my home state of Texas.
Only he says Omarillo. Like Omarosa. The way you might read Amarillo if you’ve never been to Texas or heard the George Strait song and are reading it for the first time off a list you've just seen.
You could make that mistake. You’d probably have the reasonable hope and expectation that that wouldn’t make it into the film. If you were working on this film, you’d be wrong. It did. And because the sound bed is absolutely barren of any sound but the single audio track it’s playing at any given time, it’s crystal clear and confounding.
Ultimately, I guess it isn’t a huge surprise that this is the world some people are championing. They either yearn for it, or claim the world really is this way already and I’m too dumb and woke to see it, or something like that. I hear it, I see it, but I don’t get it. It’s an awful world, even in their hyper-idealized, hyper-simplified fairy-tale versions of it, and just as the script is devoid of all the things (cycles of conflict and resolution; growth and contemplation; action and reaction) that make a story rich, the world that this film proposes or insists upon is illustrative and telling, and if I’m honest, it is an unmitigated nightmare, devoid of all the sociological spices of life that — to my taste buds — make it worth tasting.
So if, like me, you’re (even a teensy little bit) worried about the next The Birth of a Nation conservative super-hit (adjusted for inflation, The Birth of a Nation is still pound-for-pound one of the most financially successful films in history and led to the brief rebirth and resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, easily the worst frat in American history), you can maybe worry a little bit less about specifically that. This time. They’re nowhere near that level of efficacy, and they have to shamelessly beg and cajole to get their current audience to flog this unwatchable, boring content to their loved ones.
It's a mess, but there’s nothing to fear here, except the most boring time you’ve had in cinemas in a long while.
