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Paul Asay
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Movie Review

The bomb was only the beginning.

Sure, the bomb was—well, pretty bad. It’s not like the United States could just shrug off a nuclear blast off the coast of Los Angeles. But it’s not like the radiation was going to make its way to Arkansas, right?

But when the blackouts started hitting the rest of the country, well, the rest of the country knew it was trouble. Soon, the nation was in utter chaos: Video games were unplayable. Instagram was inaccessible. And if you owned a Tesla—well, heaven help you. And, of course, it marked the end of Plugged In as we know it.

But what marked the end of so many things proved to be the beginning of so many others.

And that new beginning began at Homestead.

Homestead was started by Ian Ross, an obviously fabulously wealthy guy who owned an estate somewhere in the Rockies. Ian and his family—wife, Jenna; and daughter, Gracie—lived what seemed to be a fairly comfortable life up there in their gated settlement, where for years perhaps their biggest worry was just how much it would cost to heat a 20,000 square-foot mansion.

But when the lights went out, Ian was prepared. He wasn’t just a wealthy man-about-town; he was a committed survivalist: grain stored in warehouses; generators humming around the property; enough guns to arm a couple of platoons.

He’s got the people to carry those guns, too. And when things go south, Ian calls in Jeff Ericksson, a former special ops leader, and his crack squad of mercenaries.  They’ll secure and guard the Ross compound from the chaos that’s coming.

But will it be enough? If this crisis is less a momentary blip and more the beginning of a dystopian nightmare, will Ian’s iron gate and Jeff’s iron will be enough to keep the chaos from sweeping inside? And even if Homestead does hold—at what cost?

“This might be the most prepared location in the Rockies,” Jeff tells Ian—not as  a compliment, but a warning. “Everyone’s going to want in. And I mean everyone.”

Soon enough, the hungry start hanging out by Homestead’s gate. Government officials ask why Homestead isn’t sharing. Ian has the people inside his compound to think about: his family. The people who bought into Ian’s plans. They come first, Ian firmly believes.

But what about the people outside the gates? Can he just watch them die?


Positive Elements

Ian’s not deaf to the pain outside Homestead. “They’re all good people out there,” he tells his wife, Jenna. “Do you think I like saying no?” He’s concerned about the people under his protection, and that’s honorable—to a point.

But Jenna’s love and charity go further. Sometimes, if you ask Jeff, dangerously so. When she steps outside the gates to hand out food to some hungry people, she’s almost mobbed by them. It’s a scary moment, but her commitment to helping them remains. (We’ll have more to say about that in the section below.)

The movie Homestead is really about family; and those who live and work in Ian’s compound clearly care a lot about their own. Ian, of course, loves his wife and daughter a great deal. But Jeff has his own blended family. And he and his wife, Tara, are determined to raise their three kids the best way they know how. That’s not easy: Abe, the eldest, doesn’t get along with Dad. And the new environment they’re all living in brings its own set of challenges. Tara and Jeff don’t always agree on the right way forward. But their shared commitment to their kids? Unquestioned.

Jenna’s sister, Evie, drives her own family from ground zero in California to Homestead, and they are welcomed into the compound. But we see families on the other side of those gates, too, and the moms and dads there are just as eager—and desperate—to take care of their own kids.

Spiritual Elements

Homestead is a faith-based film. Accordingly, Ian and Jenna are both motivated by their own beliefs. We hear them talk about God and the power of faith. Jenna compares Homestead to an ark at one point—an allusion to being a community of a chosen few awash in a corrupt world. But she wants to keep people outside that ark afloat, too, pulling as many people as she can along for the ride. She reminds him that they’ve been through tough seasons before, and God pulled them through.

Ian is cut from a more practical cloth. He’s keenly aware of how little food Homestead has, and when some of that food proves to be ruined—and with winter fast approaching—he knows it probably won’t be enough to keep Homestead afloat. Feed others? Ian would love to, but it’s just not possible.

When Jenna suggests they redouble their planting efforts, Ian shuts her down. “Honey, God didn’t make any of this stuff to grow while it’s freezing!”

But Jenna’s far more a loaves-and-fishes type of gal. When circumstances push her to make some decisions for Homestead, she risks trusting God in a way that seems reckless but leads to unexpected blessing: “Lucky for us, my God is bigger than the math,” she says. “I bet it all. … I bet it all on faith.”

Jeff and Tara, meanwhile, don’t have nearly the religious bent that the Rosses have. While Tara expresses her own belief and faith in God at one point, she’s apparently not passed any sort of religious practices onto their children. Abe is feeling pretty low, he turns to Claire Ross, Ian and Jenna’s teen daughter, for a shoulder to cry on.

“Can I pray for you?” Claire asks. Abe’s mystified by the concept, but he accepts the offer, and so she prays for God to help her friend and give him peace. And when she says “Amen,” she suggests he do the same.

Jeff and Tara’s adopted daughter, Georgie, appears to have some sort of ability to see the future. She draws a picture of the nuclear blast before it happens (mistaken initially, and tellingly, as a tree). And Georgie tells Tara that when they leave their house, they’ll never see it again.

In narration mode, Jenna tells us about the state of the world before the bomb hits. “Technology had become our god, and we worshiped at the altar of convenience and ease.”

Sexual & Romantic Content

Before the atomic blast goes off, Abe spends some time texting a girl named Lexie, and his siblings ask if she’s his girlfriend. Meanwhile, at the Ross compound, teen Claire shows off one of her mother’s old dresses (which sports just a touch of cleavage).

“The boys went crazy for this ol’ thing,” Jenna says when she sees Claire. But Claire laments that she’ll never be asked to prom: Even if one wanted to ask, “How could he even get past the gate?”

Abe and Claire are instantly attracted to each other once they meet after the blast—so much so that the world crumbling around them takes a bit of a back seat. Both are bashful and awkward. But when Abe needs to talk with someone, he visits Claire in her bedroom late one night. Inappropriate? Yes, and Claire is aware that it is. But nothing happens but a nice heart-to-heart, and the two wind up spending the early morning hours planting flowers.

Ben gives Claire a quick peck on the cheek before speeding back to his own family’s living quarters—sneaking in before his parents know he’s gone.

Violent Content

The entire plot is precipitated by, of course, a nuclear blast. We see the small boat carrying the amateurish explosive device, along with its two doomed crewmen as they struggle with the implications of what they’re about to do. But the only evidence we see of the blast itself is a telling mushroom cloud and a hazy red sky.

After that, civilization goes downhill.

A man is shot and killed. Another is injured after getting shot in the shoulder. (Both wounds are accompanied by some blood.) Several people fire weapons—though most often, they’re not really aiming to hurt anyone. A man slugs a woman in the face; an armed mercenary comes to the woman’s rescue and bashes the attacker’s face with the barrel of his assault weapon. (The blow is hard enough that the man falls down, and it looks as though the mercenary is prepared to kill the guy, but his superior officer intervenes.) We hear a gunshot in a nearby house.

Increasingly frantic civilians hammer on cars and threaten people. A guy hangs onto a vehicle speeding away. A training exercise done with, essentially, high-tech laser tag equipment, leaves several people “dead” and illustrates that Ian’s small army of gun-wielding amateurs needs far more training to protect the compound.

There’s talk about how experienced a teen is with a firearm. A building burns—apparently designed as a message to the Rosses. We see a kid play a violent video game (and then insist he’s not playing it).

Crude or Profane Language

We hear the word “crap” and three questionable uses of God’s name. The abbreviated profanity “BS” is used. We also hear some angry-but-indistinguishable words during altercations.

Drug & Alcohol Content

Abe and Claire make peach wine. When Abe says that they’re not old enough to drink, Claire tells him that “making wine is one of the oldest ways to preserve calories.”

Other Noteworthy Elements

The power grid is down, and Evie discovers that the family Tesla hasn’t a prayer to make it all the way to Homestead. A gas/charging station is a veritable zoo of angry, frightened people. So she ushers her family into an unmanned gas vehicle and, well, steals it. (The apparent owner, who was buying snacks inside, tries to stop them, but to no avail.)

A government official (involved in “zoning enforcement,” he says) examines Ian’s huge stock of guns and suggests that Ian doesn’t have permits for all of them. (Whether Ian does or doesn’t is never really answered during the course of the film.) He also seems to argue that the city has the right to appropriate Homestead’s food for (the official argues) the greater good for the community. He wants to collect taxes, too. Oh, and he’s pretty upset that Ian was running his sprinklers as well.

Meanwhile, Jeff suggests the world is going in the other direction. When Ian gives Jeff a tour of his sprawling property, he mentions that beyond one side of it lies government land—and that Jeff and his men can’t just start patrolling and fencing around government land: They don’t own it.

“In another week, we’re going to own whatever we want to own,” Jeff tells Ian.

A father takes his daughter to go to the bathroom outside (since the home’s toilets are no longer working.)

Conclusion

Angel Studios has become one of the biggest names in faith-based entertainment, thanks to its strong production values, recognizable actors and reasonably nuanced scripts. The quality of faith-based filmmaking has taken some strides in the last several years, and Angel Studios is one of the catalysts for that growth.

Homestead feels like it’s part of this same overall pattern—and a step in a daring new direction. Homestead is based on the book Black Autumn, written by Jason Ross and Jeff Kirkham. But it’s less of a stand-alone movie and more of a launchpad for a new television series, which also formally debuts Dec. 20.

The movie suffers a bit from that stricture. The opening credit sequence feels like the show was designed for the small screen, and the story itself feels incomplete. We’re introduced to a huge raft of characters, most of whom we barely get to know before the film ends—great marketing for the show, but perhaps not the movie itself.

Homestead’s survivalist dystopian take comes with a few elements worth noting as well. The show’s violence is something to be aware of, and overall it’s grittier than we’d expect from a standard Christian flick. And while it’s great to see Christian moviemakers dip their toes into new genre waters, Homestead comes with what appear to be some pointed messages. The one government agent we see here is the closest thing we get to a bad guy, and those pesky regulations he brings with him are right out the window. And anyone who owns an electric car? Woe to them should an enemy take out the power grid, the movie tells us. (Though while I like Teslas as much as the next guy, strictly speaking, the movie has a point.)

Homestead also packs an individualist, survivalist streak that plenty of folks will cheer, while others might purse their lips and say, “Now, wait a minute.” This film suggests that we shouldn’t trust anyone or anything out there: The only thing we can lean on is ourselves, our families and … our faith.

And this faith helps leaven Homestead’s sometimes strident individualistic tone and add complexity to its plot. The film unpacks that innate tension between taking care of our own and taking care of others—and lands firmly in the realm of loaves and fishes. Survivalism is great, as far as it goes, but community and faith are the real tools that help us survive. That help us thrive. When one character says the “lone wolf survives,”  another person wonders whether the guy’s ever seen National Geographic: The lone wolf never survives.

Homestead can, at times, feel a little stilted. But it displays an impressive bit of nuance and complexity, allowing the characters to follow their own motivations and resisting the temptation to paint them with a black-or-white brush. And this nuance is bolstered by some strong performances: While Neal McDonough is by far the film’s best-known face, he’s joined by a quality cast that brings the film’s characters to life. Again, this is a strong bit of marketing. Because while the movie feels incomplete, the characters draw you in enough to want to know where their stories go.

Homestead comes with problems. But I appreciate the ambition, dig the cast and embrace the film’s spiritual heart. Will the TV show follow suit? We’ll soon see.


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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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