Review

There is not much material to write about here. "The End of the Spear" is a beautiful looking but limited, timid, and repetitious film without much specificity of plot or character development (though "based on fact"), about a group of Christian missionaries who take it upon themselves to save a certain Amazonian forest tribe in Ecuador, the Waodani, who back in the Fifties when the story begins are said to be wiping each other out in a cultural pattern of violence and revenge.

A group of five male Christian missionaries arrive in a small plane. They take one of the natives up in the plane for a ride but later the natives become suspicious and spear them all -- including their plane. Eventually relatives and associates of the missionaries come back, and partly because they are mainly women and therefore not worth killing, they are allowed to stay. The Christians cure the tribe of a bout of polio (brought by the whites?) and this seems to convince the Waodani that their visitors are benign -- and their Christian message valid, at least, so we are told. Years later, the son of the original leader of the group of Christian missionaries (Chad Allen, who plays both roles) is persuaded to come and live among the Waodani, where his father died many years before.

A shocking element of the story is that when the small group of white men arrives and is wiped out, they come with essentially no preparation: though some of them know a few words of the Waodani language, the natives "speak too fast" and they can't communicate with them. Anyone really fluent in the language has been left at home. Given this complete lack of readiness for the task, it's not surprising that their visit was a failure. The naivete and sweetness of the missionaries are touching but rather pathetic -- and, when you gradually become aware of the smug assumption that the Waodani are simpleminded creatures who have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being Christianized and Europeanized, the missionary mindset as represented in the film becomes more deeply annoying.

Direction, acting, editing, etc., are on a crude-to-mediocre level and the main native characters are played by Americans of Latino descent (Louie Leonardo, Jack Guzman, Christina Souza) who do not in the least physically resemble Amazonian Indians. They are athletic hunks, not natives, and their behavior is cutesy and schematic rather than ethnographic. Action is underlined by crudely bombastic background music. The Christians are watered down too; there is little of a Christian message and little in the way of missionary talk among the missionaries, but it is nonetheless clear that missionaries is what they are.

Short on specific detail of event or character, the film is also singularly lacking in excitement and momentum. There is lush cinematography (the forest looks beautiful) and there are attractive-looking natives -- the latter perhaps a tad too clean: they look like they've just showered and had their hair done. But in the absence of a good script, it all falls flat. If you want a great Amazonian adventure story with larger implications about the invasions of the white man into the Amazonian forests, get a copy of John Boorman's thrilling "The Emerald Forest" (1985) and watch it.

If you come to "The End of the Spear" expecting a drama on the level of Boorman's film, you will be sorely disappointed. If you want a vague feel-good Christian theme and don't mind condescension toward "natives," this is the movie you've been waiting for.