The Mission Movie Review

An interesting setting and story where it´s first act spirals out of control to later have a fine movie about social comentary about the nature of man to be hostile towards the unknown and the destruction that leaves in it´s wake... all in the name of god.

The main story fallows a jesuit cult on a mission to annex the local natives in south america into christianity lead by father Gabriel (Jeremy Irons); later a mercenary and enslaver named  Rodrigo Mendoza (Robert De Niro) is asked, in order to atone for his sins, to join the mission and assist the priests... he later does and ultimately helps himself and the jesuits, has well has bonding with the local natives. But at the moment of truth, Cardenal Altamirano is sent by the vatican to choose what should be done about the mission when the local area gets under Portuguese control (witch allow slavery); under pressure... the Cardenal is forced to choose between two evils, either allow the Portuguese armies to enslave the local indigenous or allow the jesuit mission to continue and have the portuguese condemn their order, thus crippling the catholic church...

One negative is the first half, is unfortunately crushingly boring because of the cliched love triangle between Mendoza, his brother and his wife... witch it was built to be a dramatic moment to have Mendoza feeling guilt over his own actions after killing his brother in a duel for later in the film, but it lasts nothing; it all takes less than 5 minutes and immediately later we have the main story picking flight... I think this would have worked better if they have given it more time or maybe not show it at all instead have the character showed to be tortured it would have worked slightly better in my opinion.

I don´t like to be hard on this movie because I believe that the rest of it is very good; not great but very good indeed... I like the struggle the jesuits have to protect the indigenous from slavery after they take away their safety because of the Treaty of Madrid where they pass down under control of the portuguese, I like that the characters are each doing what they think is best for the locals and they don´t get on each others way (even if they don´t agree with each other), that is rare to see in this kind of story. The cinematographic is great, the music is great and the acting is good has well.

The Mission is a good movie that has plenty of good things going for it, it has a bad start with some unnecessary things that I honestly don´t think we needed to know and the main conflict is actually quite good...

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Hello reders... thank you for your patience!

I am still putting a few things together all the while still working on the comic... a few more reviews are underway!

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