‘The Mission’ Review: While Netflix Drowns in True-Crime Docs, Nat Geo Embraces a World Without Answers
variety.comPeter Debruge Chief Film Critic The world will never know what was going through 26-year-old Christian missionary John Allen Chau’s head when he was shot and killed by arrows off the coast of North Sentinel Island.
There are jokes, of course, and educated guesses, but the best most of us can do is search inside ourselves for the answer. That’s the approach “Boys State” directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine take with “The Mission,” using an investigation of Chau’s story as a Rorschach test of audiences’ own biases and beliefs.
Was Chau an evangelical martyr-hero who answered God’s calling and gave his life trying to convert a remote and hostile tribe?
Or was he an arrogant and unprepared American, brainwashed by the church into undertaking a suicide mission? Chau can’t answer, and though he left behind detailed diaries and a string of social media posts, the filmmakers were obliged to get creative about how to reconstruct his story, à la “Grizzly Man,” a documentary reverse-engineered from a dead man’s personal effects.
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