Earlier this year, the film Last Days premiered at Sundance Film Festival, dramatizing the life of John Allen Chau. According to a journal he left behind, Chau, an American missionary and graduate of Oral Roberts University (ORU), felt called to evangelize the unreached people of North Sentinel Island, part of an Indian archipelago in the Bay of Bengal. He was killed there in 2018 at the age of 26.
Interest in mission work marks a departure for director Justin Lin, whose long list of film credits includes directing Fast and Furious entries and episodes of True Detective. He undertook this project with the stated goal of being as sympathetic as possible to its real-world subject, and his compassion for John Chau is evident. One film critic characterized Last Days as a “respectful dramatization” that “shin[es] a light on what motivations could make someone attempt to contact a remote tribe.”
From its opening frames, Last Days evinces Lin’s cinematic expertise. Its expert direction, explosive sound design, and electric performances—especially from lead Sky Yang, who plays John—will jar viewers accustomed to amateurish faith-based cinema.
But then Last Days isn’t exactly faith based. Rather, it’s an investigation by filmmakers outside the church into the heart of a young man who apparently died on a religious suicide mission.
It’s also not the first film to take on this story. In 2023, National Geographic put out the documentary The Mission, available on YouTube, which quotes from John Chau’s journal at length. It also includes interviews with John’s friends, the missionaries who trained him, and skeptics.
These interviews point to a major difference between the two portrayals. In Last Days, John receives his Christian education and attends something like a missionary bootcamp from a parachurch organization, but then he’s mostly on his own. The Mission clarifies that John enjoyed ongoing mentorship from a support team that never appeared in his social media posts. As one ORU alumnus says in the documentary, “In any endeavor, a lot more people are involved than anybody knows.”
At the Sundance premiere of Last Days, Justin Lin contrasted his film with The Mission’s documentary style. Preferring a based-on-a-true-story approach, he told his audience he was less concerned with getting the facts of John Chau’s life exactly correct and more concerned with creating “human connection.” That meant drawing inspiration not from The Mission but from another piece of work: a feature article in Outside magazine entitled “The Last Days of John Allen Chau,” from which the movie’s title is taken.
The journalist behind that article, Alex Perry, isn’t a Christian. But for a nonbeliever trying to suss out John Chau’s motivations, he seems a worthy guide. In the early 2000s, Perry tried but failed to meet the people of the Andamans, the archipelago that includes North Sentinel Island. Like Chau, he saw the islands as something “big and difficult and dangerous and extraordinary,” an opportunity for adventure.
“Where John and I differed was that while I had been a reporter pursuing a story, John wanted to be the story,” Perry writes. But a look into Chau’s journals reveals something different: He wanted to proclaim a story, the gospel.
The journalist does acknowledge an evangelical perspective. One of his quoted sources, a missionary who’d met Chau, said, “Whether you buy John’s reasoning comes down to whether you share his faith.” If God and his judgment are real and Christ died for the world, it’s rational to risk it all to take that message to every last people group. But if this is all just fantasy, it’s dangerous—a mix of “obsession, arrogance, self-deception … an almost inhuman absence of doubt,” as Perry puts it.
The core problem is that it’s hard, maybe impossible, for a nonbeliever to understand what could motivate a person to risk martyrdom for Christ. Perry repeatedly quotes Chau’s motto, #SoliDeoGloria, though he lacks the framework to make sense of “the cryptic Latin hashtag.” And the movie inspired by his article doesn’t make sense of it either.
Without a sense of “to the glory of God alone,” Last Days remains unfinished and unsteady. Director Justin Lin’s choice to rely on Alex Perry’s interpretation is not just an inaccuracy but an artistic error; it fails to supply a satisfactory motivation for its main character’s martyrdom. The movie’s John Chau, though cast in the best possible light, is a man of incomprehensible, unmotivated faith.
Early in the film, John attends his final chapel before graduating from ORU. The speaker challenges each student to light a candle, symbolizing a commitment to light the whole world with the gospel of Christ. But John demurs. The film never investigates why he initially rejects the call.
Nor does it explain why he eventually accepts. We see John committing to a life of missions only after his father, a doctor, runs into legal trouble surrounding painkiller prescriptions. Last Days seems to imply, ambiguously, that John is actually running from his father wound, whereas The Mission reveals a young man genuinely motivated to strive for God’s glory.
It’s this question of motivation that caused the most confusion for the missionaries I spoke with after they watched the film in Park City, Utah.
One missionary expressed regret at a missed opportunity. “I was that way, and now I’m this way,” he said of his own conversion experience. “It’s impossible not to share.” He loves proclaiming the gospel. It’s that love that doesn’t translate in Last Days.
Another missionary asked a different question: “Who’s this for?” He didn’t think that John Chau comes off as feckless or insane, per the accusations of real-life social media haters; the film acknowledges and dismisses these critiques. But the movie also won’t inspire believers. Its middle ground will “pretty much alienate most evangelicals,” he said. “They’re not going to watch.”
He may be right. But the care with which the film treads that middle ground is still remarkable. When Hollywood wants to portray a believer, it often fills him with hesitancy; audiences resonate more with Doubting Thomas than with Simon the Zealot. You can find a recent example in award-winning Conclave (2024), as Ralph Fiennes’s uncertain Cardinal Thomas Lawrence gives non-Catholics a point of entry into Rome’s highest echelons.
By contrast, Justin Lin’s rendering of John Chau is refreshingly faithful. Unwavering, John sets his face toward North Sentinel Island like Christ toward Jerusalem. Uncertainty may shroud his motivation, but the objective at least remains clear.
Another missionary hopes evangelicals will watch the movie in spite of its shortcomings. “It felt very familiar,” she told me, “in terms of a young missionary’s experience.” With 35 years in ministry and 20 of those as a missionary to Africa, her first reaction was to emphasize how well Last Days honored John Chau: “It was a nonjudgmental approach.”
She also appreciated how the film exposed the pitfalls that confront young ideologues on the mission field. “Due to colonialism, which is so ingrained in us and is the other side of the coin of white supremacy, we just think we know better,” she said.
In Last Days, this cocksure Christianity is exemplified in Chandler (Toby Wallace), a fast-talking, risk-taking young man who shows John Chau the ropes of Christian thrill-seeking. Hours after meeting John, Chandler invites him for a ride in his prop plane, emblazoned with the slogan “Jesus is my copilot.” Chandler awes John with the scenery below before inviting the inexperienced young man to grab the control yoke and pilot for a bit.
In Last Days, what John needs is an Obi-Wan. What Chandler gives him is a Han Solo—a slightly older, more worldly, but less wise companion.
The lack of meaningful discipleship is a huge mistake for Last Days’ John Chau, maybe his fatal flaw. “You get a 20-something who thinks he or she knows better, and there’s no stopping it,” said one missionary. Another agreed that mulish independence is a real threat to mission work, even if the particular excesses of Chandler were “cartoonish.”
The missionaries I spoke with hope that the film’s depiction of their work will lead to conversations. But I regret that they may come at the cost of John Chau’s portrayal in Last Days. The film presents him as mostly autonomous—God’s own loose cannon—though The Mission testifies to his integration in a Christian community. This oversight, and the film’s failure to capture his heart for Jesus, is a failure to convey his soul. On screen, John Chau’s enthusiasm seems to come from nowhere. Without a lost-and-found character arc, he’s just lost.
John will forever be a man younger than me, as will his hero, Jim Elliot, who was also killed on the mission field. Yet they will also always be, for me, titans of the faith. Each possessed the courage to lay down his life for a gospel that had changed it. Their testimonies resonate like thunder in the great cloud of witnesses, a thunder powerful enough to rattle fellow believers.
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose,” Jim Elliot once said. By this standard, the John Chau of Last Days, who sacrifices everything to gain nothing, is a desperate if well-intentioned fool. How different was the real-world John Chau, a young man who glorified God alone through his life and in his death, laying down his life for friends to whom he ministered so briefly.
Trevor Babcock is an assistant professor of English at Williams Baptist University, where he teaches film and other subjects. His chapter on David Lynch’s Christian and Hindu influences will appear in the forthcoming book Theology, Religion, and Twin Peaks as part of the Theology, Religion, and Pop Culture series.
The post ‘Last Days’ Has No Motivation for Martyrdom appeared first on Christianity Today.