As kids growing up in the 1960s, one of our favorite pastimes was finding the latest copy of National Geographic and flipping through the pages until we found some story on the latest discovery of some long lost tribe of indigenous jungle natives. We looked, of course, just to see the "naughty bits" that they "dared" to expose to the rest of the clothed world, but we were also amazed that such "primitive" people existed in our sophisticated day and age (which looks downright primitive in its own right in hindsight).
The magazine and others like it got away with showing such nudity (usually just breasts and buttocks) because the belief at that time was that those depicted in the stories were less than fully human and thus could be viewed in their natural state. It was a viewpoint shared by most of the civilized world for hundreds if not thousands of years and that "zoo" mentality led to such indigenous peoples being "discovered," infiltrated and conquered in any number of ways.
Of course, sometimes they fought back (see also the English colonization of what would become America), giving more credence to the view of them as savages. Such was the case back in 1956 when a group of missionaries were killed by an Ecuadorian tribe known as the Waodani. Despite their fierce and lethal reputation, the missionaries were determined to save them through the Gospel, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Waodani didn't figure they needed any such sort of rescue.
Yet, rather than any sort of retribution on the part of the missionaries (as if) or any governmental and/or military parties, the surviving members of the original group continued with their quest. And to top it off, one of the children of the slain men, Steve Saint, actually befriended those who killed his father and the others.
Thus the stage would seem set for an intriguing and maybe occasionally exciting or stirring recreation of those events. And that's especially true considering that the writer/director of "End of the Spear" was also the filmmaker behind the documentary of the same subject matter, "Beyond the Gates of Splendor." Although I have not seen that documentary, I can only guess that Jim Hanon probably did a better job with that effort than with the dramatization here.
And that's not just because documentaries are nearly always better at tackling any real-life story than their "Hollywood" style counterparts. Instead, it's that Hanon doesn't yet have the experience to tell the story in a convincing and/or engagingly dramatic fashion.
What's most interesting is that much (but not all) of the missionary aspect has been buried beneath the drama. Sure, the underlying themes and context are lurking right below the surface and there's one "white light" Heavenly scene and one bit of dialogue about the white folks being ready for Heaven but not the natives.
Yet, for anyone blind and/or oblivious to what's really going on, they'd be hard pressed to know the real motives (we hear that they're trying to stop the Waodani before they murder themselves into extinction, rather than that they need some soul saving). I'm guessing the religious toning down is an effort not to appear preachy to the general public, but the switch feels rather disingenuous to the story, both real and fictionalized.
All of that aside, and notwithstanding its Hollywood style veneer, the film is rather clunky from a storytelling perspective. Hanon may proceed from point A to Z (starting with point Y to get the ball rolling before doing the usual movie flashback to show what leads up to that moment), but no one's going to confuse his effort here with anything a seasoned feature film director could have delivered covering the same basic material.
The acting is competent at best (and sometimes rather stiff), the pacing is off much of the time, and we're never really given the opportunity to sympathize with or know any of the characters on either side of the story (while some get a fair amount of screen time, their personification is superficial at best), thus lessening our involvement in them and the overall film. Accordingly, the big pivotal scene -- the attack on the missionaries -- isn't as powerful as it could and should have been.
In fact, the film is teeming with thematic elements -- the missionaries and their goals and beliefs, along with that of the Waodani tribe and their violent culture, and obviously the clash of both -- but the film barely delves into them, and instead just uses all of that as story points.
If anything, and considering the clips from "Gates of Splendor" shown during the end credits, "End of the Spear" -- presumably named for the cessation of violence as well as being on the wrong receiving end of that weapon -- will likely make people want to seek out the original documentary to get a more realistic view of the real story. This fictionalized account rates as just a 4 out of 10.
![[Logo]](/images/screenit_logo2.jpg){kind=logo}
