The Mission
videos, movies reviews
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List Price: $14.98
Features
• Closed-captioned
• Color
• Dolby
• NTSC
In Theaters : 31 October, 1986
Video Release : 04 December, 1992 |
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The Mission Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Harrowing but magical
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This is certainly a fine piece of movie-making...but it is not a feel-good movie. Beautiful, tragic, harrowing would be more the words. If you just read a brief description that it's about the troubles of Jesuit missionaries in South America in the 18th century, you will NOT get the idea!
First off, it may not sound very dramatic: well, that gets sorted out pretty quick at the beginning, with the launch of the crucified man to his death down the turbulent river and over the huge thundering waterfall, and then the intrepid priest struggling up sheer water-soaked rocks above a drop of hundreds of feet...And his first encounter with the painted and arrow-bearing tribe - wonderful.
But as the movie progresses, and the Jesuits build their jungle mission, and the unspeakable Don Cabeza reminds us how truly horrible colonial expansion could be, we are plunged into a maelstrom of good and evil. It's the world as we would love it to be and occasionally glimpse it, based on love and integrity, versus the world as it is...or, as the Cardinal says at the end, how we have made it. Greed and power versus simple naked humanity.. guess who wins.
Although the Jesuits are presented as the "good guys" here, there is a point where the Cardinal (I think it's him) acknowledges that the Indians would have been happier and better off if the sea and winds had not brought ANY of the white race to their shores - which is pretty much true of North America as well.
As I say, a beautiful but not cheering movie. The director's commentary is worth hearing - he actually sought out one of the few hardly-contacted tribes and involved them in this movie. Was that a good thing? who knows. An intriguing sidelight is his mention that they took some members of the tribe to London and New York. After a while the tribe said they wanted to go home. In our cities, they respected our skill with stone, but there was far too much of it: they liked their own skills with the living world, the plants and animals. Our world was oppressive.
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The Mission movies, videos.