Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
When a Spanish Jesuit goes into the South American wilderness to build a mission in the hope of converting the Indians of the region, a slave hunter is converted and joins his mission. When Spain sells the colony to Portugal, they are forced to defend all they have built against the Portuguese aggressors.
The Mission is elevated by extraordinary performances from Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons, and Ennio Morricone's iconic score. Roland Joffé's cinematography, capturing the Iguazú Falls and lush jungle landscapes, is genuinely stunning and among the finest location work of the decade. The ending—depicting the brutal destruction of the missions—carries real tragic weight and moral ambiguity. The plot, while earnest and compelling, is somewhat straightforward in its arc of redemption and doomed resistance, and the film's themes of colonialism and faith, while handled seriously, were not entirely novel territory for historical epics of the era. Novelty is solid but not exceptional—it perfects a certain kind of prestige historical drama without radically reinventing it.