This is a biopic of Joseph Smith, book-ended and with occasional editorial comment coming from an Englishman and his adult daughter, a Mormon convert, traveling up the Mississippi to Nauvoo the day before Joseph's departure to Carthage. As the daughter tells the father about the prophet we are shown prominent scenes from his life. The film culminates in his assassination after the duo have arrived in Nauvoo.
Church leaders and other Latter-day Saints have dreamed of creating a biographical film of Joseph Smith for over thirty years. Though Richard Dutcher's recent quest to create such a film is probably the best-known aborted effort, the LDS Church itself spent a great deal of time and resources in the 1970s pursuing a feature film that could be released in commercial theaters to bring the life of Joseph Smith to a paying public. Robert Bolt was briefly retained, and then for a time all original scripts were accepted on spec. These energies were eventually diverted elsewhere, but the impulse remained, and Joseph Smith: Prophet of the Restoration can be seen as a partial fulfillment of that dream (partial because it is playing in a single, Church-owned cinema rather than in commercial centers across the nation).
The film is the work of longtime collaborators T.C. Christensen and Gary Cook, who also worked together on the recent remake of "The First Vision", called "The Restoration" (2003). The co-directors were aware of the distancing effect of the epic scope of the Church's previous two films shown in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, and deliberately sought a more intimate feel in tone, characterization, and even cinematography (the 70mm film stock of Legacy and Testaments was eschewed in favor of Super-35mm, projected digitally on two vertically stacked projectors).
Released for the bicentennial of Joseph Smith's birth, the film was also original in that it was quickly distributed to LDS visitor's centers throughout North America, so that it could gain a wider audience than would be available at Temple Square alone.
However, the film suffered somewhat in its aims as a missionary tool, so in 2011 the film was substantially re-cut with many additional scenes of Joseph Smith added while most of the secondary characters, including the bookend narrative of the English family journeying to Nauvoo, were cut. The hope was that this newer version would be a better introduction for non-Mormons to Joseph Smith.
