Mission impossible

IT'S sincere to the point of boredom, but The Mission (World, 9.35pm) is also big on superb photography (though small on plot development). The power of this photography, much of it in remote actualities, will be lost on the small screen. This is the kind of film you want one of those ridiculous home entertainment centres for, supposing there are apartments in Hong Kong big enough to contain them.

The Mission, with Robert De Niro as a ruthless slave trader and Jeremy Irons as a Jesuit priest trying to convert the Guarani Indians, goes something like this: slave trader kills Indians and takes others as slaves; then kills younger brother in a fight for a woman. But he has a conscience and feels he must do a bit of penance, so he joins the mission of the title, which is run by Irons and in financial trouble.

This is a British-made historical epic and no-one does British-made historical epics as well as the British do. Roland Joffe directed and made it moving and visually stunning. But he did not avoid the pitfall 'big' movies often stumble into: it tries to do too much and almost ends up being unable to do anything. Irons' character is a shell of a man, as is De Niro's.

Perhaps the most distressing thing about The Mission is that it is another film made by Europeans or Americans that, while trying to be sympathetic to the plight of the South American Indians, portrays them as an indistinguishable mass of childlike innocents just waiting to be exploited by outsiders.

AS WAR films go, which is usually violent and noisy, The Battle of the Bulge (Pearl, 9.30pm) is up there with the rest. In fact it's generally accepted as being one of the best of the genre, simply because it doesn't get too bogged down in conflagrations (though followers of these things will be pleased to know there are enough to hold their attention). The Battle Of The Bulge is so clear and so technically exact that the audience can see the battle unfold with the precision of a chess game. Death and destruction was not handled so well again until Apocalypse Now.

The historic battle of the title took place in 1944, when the Germans were supposedly on the retreat. American colonel Henry Fonda recognises from an intelligence photograph his old nemesis, German tank commander Robert Shaw, and realises that a counter-attack might be in the offing.