The Oath

In 400 A.D., in a forgotten time in ancient America, a lone Hebraic fugitive must preserve the history of his fallen nation while being hunted by a ruthless tyrant.

This film starts out with the text...

Legends tells of an ancient grudge. Two brothers, from Joseph of Egypt’s line, who crossed the ocean for a promised land. Their feud spawned two great nations: Nephites and Lamanites. After a millennium of war… only one Nephite remains. The hunted one.

Wait a minute…

Is this a Mormon movie?

Shit. Yes it is. Damn it. I thought this was just going to be a weird pre-colonial fantasy movie or something, which I guess it kind of is, but it's also Mormonism: The Prequel. I really wish that instead of The Oath, it had been titled Mormon: The Tale of the Golden Plates, or some shit like that, because then I would've just scrolled past.

But they didn't, and I don't like to walk out on films, so...

Set in North America around 400 CE, The Oath dramatizes the legend of Moroni, the Nephite prophet who is the source of Mormon beliefs. According to the legend, Moroni, a direct descendant of Joseph from the Bible, created, protected, and then hid the special golden plates which Joseph Smith discovered years later, and then translated into the Book of Mormon.

We join the story already in progress...

Moroni is the last of the Nephites, doing a Community Theatre version of Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans, as he lives a life of exile in the deep woods. He is constantly on the run from the Lamanites, the Nephites long and most hated of enemy. So, he spends his days being stoic and pious and alone, and definitely not masturbating, because he is too busy being one with nature in a very zen-like way, but in a "no soda, no smoking" Mormon way, not in a "foreign" religion way. Some days, he just sits on a cliff and gazes off into the distance, filled with regrets and a deep longing for days long past, while meditating shirtless, but again, this is not in a "foreign" religion kind of way. This is all done like a good Mormon. It's all very white and very manly, but also very straight too, just a bearded shirtless guy in the woods, lifting things and being sweaty.

Most importantly, he also spends a lot of time on a personal project, preserving the history of his people in a book where the pages are literally made of gold.

But then he meets a woman in the woods, and she is on the edge of death. Even worse, her animal skin one-piece swimsuit is showing not just a lot of ankle, but a fair amount of high thigh too.

Dang it... the temptation!

Being such a manly protector, Moroni has no choice but to take her back to his camp and nurse her back to help. As a result, Moroni's life of purity and solitude is completely up-ended. The woman's name is Bathsheba, and she is very clean for being on the run. Her hair looks great too, fresh from the salon. She tells Moroni how she has recently escaped the Lamanites, where she was one of the concubines to the Lamanite King, a man named Aaron. Bathsheba almost immediately falls in love with Moroni because he is so incredibly manly and stoic. Moroni thinks that Bathsheba she might be okay too, even though she's a woman. But since they aren't married, a 100% chaste bond develops between them, so there's no funny business going on, and definitely no "soaking" either, even though that's a totally approved by God sex loophole.

But then King Aaron and his thugs stumble across their camps, and they want Bathsheba back, and also the Book of Gold Plates, because honestly... it's a lot of gold. Moroni is totally cool with the fact that Aaron had a bunch of girlfriends, but no dirty Lamanite is gonna put his hands on the Book of Gold Plates. But Aaron is like, too bad, so sad, I'm gonna do what I want. And that's when Moroni has to dig up his sword and start killin' some motherfuckers.

Eventually, the film's epilogue explains that Moroni’s Book of Gold Plates are believed to be what were discovered on September 22nd, 1823, in what is now Palmyra, New York, by a man names Joseph Smith, a man who just so happened to need a religion that would allow him to freely indulge in the practice of polygamy, especially with minors, and thus... God delivered.

Smith then translated the Golden Plates, and in 1830 published The Book of Mormon, which is considered to be the "4th most influential book” in American literature, a quote the film attributed to the “United States Library of Congress.” And now, nearly 200 years later, here we are with The Oath, a film based on the writer/director's own short film titled Reign of Judges: Title of Liberty, which was inspired by events depicted in the Book of Mormon.

And it is terrible. Absolutely terrible.

And not just because it's creepy religious propaganda either. The Oath is dull, obvious, and amateurish in every way. Plus, much like their Evangelical Christian counterparts, Mormon-funded attempts at popular culture are consistently these strange, terrible, incredibly unfunny, terminally uncool beasts of low quality, all hampered by their obvious and singular focus on their specific regressive agenda. And that is totally the case here.

Even worse, this is also clearly a huge vanity project in the service of the most inexplicable and undersevedly massive of egos, as the oft-shirtless star of the film just so happens to also be the producer. And the director. Also the writer. He very clearly considers himself to be the coolest, the manliest, and the most awesome of motherfucking Mormons alive. Whenever I stumble across a movie like this, these projects driven by talentless narcissists that focus directly on themselves... which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is pretty common when you're spending time in the low budget end of movie choices... my question is always: Did someone actually give this person the money they needed to make this film, or are their parents rich?

A little from Column A, and a little from Column B?

Perhaps worst of all, these kinds of crappy somehow decently funded films will also often feature formerly well-known celebrities now well into their "I'll take any job with a paycheck" era. And so, we all must bear witness to the shame of the once A-list celebrity Billy Zane, as he slums it in the role of a weird-beard ancient world warlord who seemingly has an accent like the cliche of an Irish beat cop.

Lo, how the mighty have fallen...

But mostly, the main issue here is rooted in Mormonism itself. The Lamanites are the awful monsterous bad guys in this film, and with the notable exception of Billy Zane, are all Native Americans. The core point of the original story in the Mormon religion is that these savage and godless mud people destroyed the righteous, pure, clean, and white Nephites, the ones who had the true, God-given claim to this land. As a result of their actions, the Lamanites have been deservedly cursed as a people to this day. Because it's based on the events depicted in the Book of Mormon, this is what the film is about, and while it's true it doesn't look directly into the camera and explain this, it very clearly presents this on screen, so that's pretty shitty, but then... what else can you expect from an organized religion?

Big time thumbs down.