The 2023 National Geographic documentary The Mission, directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, captured the story of John Chau, 26, an Oral Roberts University graduate and evangelical missionary who was killed in 2018 by arrows when he attempted to make contact with one of the most isolated Indigenous peoples, on remote North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean.
Shortly after Chau’s death, an investigative journalist team’s report in the International New York Times edition highlighted how the young man had been obsessed since his high school days about spreading the gospel to an isolated tribe whose existence defies every vestige of social existence in the modern day. “He did it all with the single-minded goal of breaking through to the people of North Sentinel Island, a remote outpost of hunters and gatherers in the Andaman Sea who had shown tremendous hostility to outsiders,” the report noted. “It was an obsession. Ever since Mr. Chau had learned in high school through a missionary website, the Joshua Project, that the North Sentinel people were perhaps the most isolated in the world, he was hooked. Much of what he did the rest of his short life was directed toward this mission.”
Directed by Justin Lin, Last Days is a narrative based on Chau. Lin, a Sundance alumnus, is well known for directing five films in the Fast & Furious franchise, returns to themes evoking his Sundance debut of 2002 when he directed Better Luck Tomorrow about an Asian-American man trying to reconcile his ambitions with social and family pressures. Lin has helmed many large-scale film and TV projects, including Star Trek Beyond, and several broadcast series.
Lin attempts to juggle two narratives in Last Days. One could say something similar about the volume of backstory material in The Mission. One is Chau’s (Sky Yang) insatiable desire to distinguish himself in his accomplishments as an evangelical who is convinced that he can convert a tribe that has voluntarily chosen to be utterly isolated. The second emerges when Lin (with Ben Ripley’s screenplays) works backward from the climactic events, clearing a path to comprehend the complicated relationship with his father. While the film’s production values and visuals are superb, along with a well-crafted score by Nathan Alexander, the creative brief in this dual narrative counterpoint does not illuminate more in Chau’s than what already was presented in The Mission documentary. Chau’s body has never been recovered from North Sentinel Island and essentially the book on his story will never be closed.
In the film, Chau’s father (Ken Leung) would prefer to see his son follow in his own career footsteps as a doctor. Meanwhile, the father’s medical career is setback by an investigation that he illegally prescribed pain medications. The film portrays a warmer relationship between the two in Chau’s boyhood years but it has become distant and aloof, as Chau’s evangelical fervor has grown ever more pronounced. The Mission documentary shows the heartbroken father expressing that he should never have allowed his son to become so involved with the evangelical church or with the idea of missionary work. In the investigative piece from the International New York Times, Chau’s American mother was a lawyer and his father, Patrick, from China, was a psychiatrist. “His father, Patrick, said he disagreed with his son about many religious matters and did not want him going to North Sentinel but was ’in the dark most of the time’ about what his son was doing.” The film poses an unflattering frame of evangelical missionary work. It does open up the debate. Is evangelical missionary work pure as some might claim it to be in altruistic motivations or is evangelical fervor tied to one’s own loss at finding true self-actualization and true self-esteem? It perhaps would be enlightening to see how Chau’s story sits in the thematic foundations of Viktor Frankl’s 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning.
In an interview with The Utah Review, Alexander, who had worked with Lin on other films including Fast and Furious 9, said he looked forward to Last Days and the opportunity to dig into the personal story vehicle of a larger-than-life narrative.
It turned out to be a fast-paced assignment for Alexander to compose the score. “I was dropped into a tight ten-week post-production schedule and had six-and-a-half weeks to finish,” he recalled. For Last Days, unlike with some of the previous projects with the director, Alexander said that he enjoyed the opportunity to talk face-to-face with Lin about what the music should convey thematically.
“We talked for a couple of hours and not just about this film but about movies in general. I had read the script for Better Luck Tomorrow [Lin’s Sundance debut in 2002] and it seemed to be thematically related, in terms of relationship dynamics between the father and son,” he added. “I had heard about the news [Chau’s death] shortly after it happened and I thought it was pretty fascinating that both Justin [Lin] and I had the same thoughts about Chau’s relationship with his father,” Alexander said.
The last eight minutes of the film is stripped of dialogue, which gives Alexander’s score the moment to flex music’s dramatic accompaniment to the narrative’s pivotal discovery and idiomatically to the pure-at-heart relationship between father and son. Alexander juxtaposes the warmth of that sense of familial love with the distancing imprints of isolation and struggles to connect. This is achieved side-by-side, with processed piano, synthesizer and guitar effects for intimacy and doubled-up strings with harmonics that lead to shimmering reverberating sensations of emotions.