good and bad colonialists

Rating: 7/10 (22 August 2006)

This film is a treatise on colonial ambiguities and the contradictions of empire-building.The Jesuit order, an order of the Catholic Church devoted to tertiary education, is the ideological wing of the Catholic empires. The empires are born not because of altruism but because of the greed of powerful courts, conformism of general populations and lack of spiritual and basically material defences of indigenous peoples. The centre views the periphery as source of enrichment, but some charismatic people such as Jeremy Irons's Jesuit take seriously the teachings of the religion they profess and try to find a modus vivendi between the various constitutive elements of imperial societies. For leaders as usually religion is sham under which they hide their power-hungry, greedy and vicious nature. As the Bible says they are false prophets, wolves dressed in the garments of sheep.But in the movie at least there is a true prophet -jeremy Irons- and a basically well-meaning but lukewarm church dignitary who fails beside his good intentions to prevent the impending catastrophe, proving the veracity of the old saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.It is a good movie on a perennial theme.