This movie is probably my all time favorite. I have watched it over and over again. The music is thrilling, gentle, and sad. Most moving performances. I have the sound track also, it is most enjoyable. It is a lesson in life. BRAVO!
November 14, 2008 |  | Worth watching on so many levels |  |
So much has been written about The Mission and it has received so many plaudits, that it is redundant to re-list them here. Suffice it to say that this film remains hugely worth watching on every significant level: photography, musical score, acting, etc. One can only envy those who get to watch it for the first time.
The bonus documentary about the challenges and advantages of using actual natives to play the Guarani is worth watching as well.
November 10, 2008I was interested in seeing "The Mission" when it first came out. I didn't realize that it would take over 20 years before I finally was able to take it in. It seems to have aged well but, then, most historical epics usually do. I was overwelmed by the magnitude of the cinematography. The falls that we revisit often in the film were worth the price of admission.
The film tells of an historic event in which Jesuit priests created some missions in an area around Brazil's southeastern border. The time was around 1750 during which Spanish and Portugese settlements were expanding and civilizing. The Jesuits expand their missionary work to a remote area as we start following the story. The underlying motives of the settlers and the priests are in conflict and Rodrigo, Robert DeNiro's character, is a man who switched between the two factions. We get the general idea as to what will happen. The same thing always happens in these circumstances. After a lot of talk and frontier diplomacy, conflict ensues and the film ends with a sense that the next generation will have to regroup further into the jungle.
Much of "The Mission" was quite compelling. The dialogue between the priests and the Cardinal was interesting at times and predictible at other times. I was bothered by the director's failure to consider that the children that had significant roles in this film did not age. It left the impression that the incredible transformation from "savage" to converted and cultured took place in less than a year's time.
This is a movie that makes many people mad at "civilization". It really is hard to figure out who are the good guys and, I believe, that was intential. It may be that there isn't more than one who fits that title. Maybe that's too many.
October 23, 2008| | | History is not dead by repetitive and cycliical | |
A film that comes from so far away 22 years ago that the story, or the history, of the film is no longer important, but was it important even in 1986? Today the struggle between the two Christian kings of Portugal and of Spain on one hand, though hostile to each other when the other party is absent, and the church on the other hand, a church that is also divided between the European hierarchy that only sees the survival they have to go through in Europe by defending there their interests by sacrificing a few missions in South America. Today these details are irrelevant The Christian church or churches have long abandoned this kind of policy, particularly the Catholic church. But today the general pattern of the story, the massacre, the slaughter, the slaying of a whole Indian, local population to the sole interest of the colonial powers who try to put their hands on the riches and resources of some foreign countries, like oil in Iraq for instance is quite a familiar story. And what about that American war hero who became an American war hero in a war that killed several million people and devastated a whole country for the sole political and economic interests of one country, one country alone. Who cares in the west about the local indigenous population that gets killed by western bullets? Like The Sons of The Pioneers used to sing, "Lie Low, Little Doggies, Lie Low on the Ground". We are living in a world that stands upside down in two ways. It is still standing upside down if we consider normal human ethics that tells us to help the poor and the weak and to respect the goods and property of other people, particularly their national territory. And yet that world that is upside down is in the process of tilting over and then getting upside down a second time, which might bring it upside up and downside down. The champion of deregulated free market jungle economy is nationalizing most of the American banking system and is getting ready to do the same with the car industry that has been playing with bankruptcy for quite a few years now. Less state he says the candidate of the party of this president. Yet this president nationalizes all that is getting into difficult straits by their own fault, but he does not forget that public money is the property of the rich since they did not contribute much and he is trying to give them a financial bonanza for their dumb incompetence. You see the pattern. That pattern that is still alive like hell and kicking like a dumb mule. Don't worry, as usual, before the world gets back to upright many people will be killed and will die. Before Brazil got a president that is starting the reversal of that historical injustice and mistake of 1750, quite a few millions were killed or enslaved or tortured or assassinated or whatever provided death was the end of it. But this film gives you another element of that pattern. The powerful who plan to genocide you manage to present the whole matter in such a way that you have to agree to foot the bill which will hurt you or otherwise the depression that would ensue would not only hurt, it would bring humanity a few hundred million individuals down, lower and shorter. And in the back of their heads they believe that this is sustainable since for at least twenty or thirty years the overpopulation of the world will be slowed down. As these vultures would say: there is always a positive point in any negative event. But the more I try to think positively the more I stand on the side of all these priests, these Jesuits, those who fought and died fighting and those who did not fight and died trying to bring God's word down on earth. The only thing that came for all of them was bullets, bullets and more bullets. Is that pattern human, historical, or plain characteristic of one particular period? But why does it come back up so regularly through the centuries?
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
September 27, 2008I first saw this thought-provoking film on the big screen in 70mm and believed it to be one of the best films of the 80's. Unfortunately the film opened to disappointing business in the U.S. but did much better in Europe (It received a Golden Palm at Cannes). DeNiro and Irons each give excellent performances of 2 men caught in conflict over the problems of church vs state in the colonization of the tribes in the Americas. Many people thought this to be a religious film but it is far more than that. Rather to divulge a lot about the plot, I would rather imply that this film is a triumph in the sense that it is action filled spectacle that makes us think rather than just entertain us. It's too bad that director Roland Joffe has descended nowadays to doing a slasher film with an American actress (Elisha Cuthbert). Anyway do see this film for the direction, the stars and of course, the evocative score by Ennio Morricone who should've won the Oscar that year.
June 30, 2008More reviews at Amazon.com ...
Daily Birthdays
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