Product Description

Featuring a majestic score by Ennio Morricone and lush Oscar-winning cinematography by Chris Menges. It won the top prize at Cannes in 1986 and was nominated for a Best Film Oscar. The film is shot through with piercing, haunting imagery, pictures of enduring imaginative force. A visually stunning epic, THE MISSION recounts the true story of two men--a man of the sword (Robert De Niro) and a man of the cloth (Jeremy Irons)--both Jesuit missionaries who defied the colonial forces of mighty Spain and Portugal to save an Indian tribe from slavery in mid-18th-century South America. Mendoza (De Niro) is a slave trader and colonial imperialist who murdered his own brother (Aidan Quinn) and seeks penance for his sins by becomining a missionary at Father Gabriel's (Irons) mountaintop mission. The Mission is a rich and thought-provoking. It contains moving images of despair, penance, and redemption that are among the most evocative ever filmed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3567 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2003-05-13
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Number of discs: 2
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish, French
• Number of discs: 2
• Dimensions: .45 pounds
• Running time: 125 minutes

Features

• DVD
• 2-Disc Special Edition
• 16 X 9 LETTERBOX
• Digi-Pack
• Multi Disc
• Dolby Surround 5.1 - English Dolby Surround Stereo - French
• Audio Commentary: Feature-Length Commentary by Director ROLAND JOFFE Documentary: Making of The Mission - A Gripping Hour-Long Documentary Look at the Film's On-Location Shoot in Argentina and Colombia. Other: Cast/Director/Writer Film Highlights
• 2-Disc Special Edition

Amazon.com
Roland Joffé (The Killing Fields) directs this fuzzy effort at a David Lean-like epic without David Lean's sense of emotional proportion. Lean's most important screenwriting collaborator, Robert Bolt, in fact wrote The Mission, which concerns a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons) who establishes a church in the hostile jungles of Brazil and then finds his work threatened by greed and political forces among his superiors. Robert De Niro is briefly effective as a callous soldier who kills his own brother and then turns to Irons's character to oversee his penance and conversion to the clergy. The narrative and dramatic forces at work in this movie should be more stirring and powerful than they are--the problem being that Joffé is too removed from them to allow us in. --Tom Keogh

Review
The Mission depicts the challenge of conscience that confronts us all in a world convulsed by power, greed, and violence. Its power lies in the way it convinces us that the fierce conflict-ridden world we see on the screen is similar to the one in which we live today. At the same time, The Mission is a deeply moving film that reminds us of the vitality of love, the miracle of grace, and the transforming power of acts of conscience. --Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat