Ka Whawhai Tonu (Struggle Without End)

imagineNATIVE 25 FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW! Movies simply don’t get much better than the flat-out Maori masterwork Ka Whawhai Tonu (Struggle Without End), directed by Mike Jonathan and written by Tim Worrall. In New Zealand in 1864, the Maori people rejected the white colonists’ attempts to take over and went to war. The head man, Rewi Maniapoto (Temuera Morrison), points out to the gathered tribes that they number 300 and will be up against 3000. Rewi despises the colonizers but doesn’t want to see his people wiped out. The warriors inform him that it is too late, as they have already captured an enemy soldier for the first sacrifice. The boy in a soldier’s hat and jacket, whom they captured, Haki (Paku Fernandez), claims he is only trying to get to his grandmother and that he found the clothes in a ransacked village. But the tribe has already confirmed with their war god that Haki is to be sacrificed to her once the white army arrives. Their war god speaks to them through a teenage girl, Kopu (Hinerangi Harawira-Nicholas), who is seen by some as being creepy and prone to witchery. Kopu scolds the prisoner for daring to try to talk to her, as she is the vessel of the war god and is sacred. Haki responds by telling Kopu that it sounds like she must get very lonely. Kopu stares deeply into the eyes of this soon-to-be dead boy, as he is exactly right…

“…death, doom, desperation, and defiance in the face of obliteration…”

Pardon me while I address all the children in the world about Ka Whawhai Tonu (Struggle Without End). Hi kids, I know you could give a s**t about 1864, I get it. However, children, this movie is so much more than a very violent history lesson. This is the most metal movie you will ever have seen, kiddies. I know things like dates and battles mean little to you, but I also know that metal rules many of your little worlds. That goes double for all you indigenous kids, as I have had the profound pleasure of playing on the same bill as some amazing rez metal bands. All the glorified defiance you get from metal is waiting in triple doses in this movie.

There is an electrifying moment in the beginning when we see the warriors in all of their tattoos and appropriated finery that hits as hard as the opening to Clockwork Orange. The female protagonist channels a war god. How metal is that? I mean no insult by this classification, nor do I mean to belittle the historic significance of the deadly colonization. But it is my job as a critic to try to facilitate communicating the worth of an artwork to the audience that would appreciate it the most. This time, the audience is the one that digs metal but rarely gets the same rush from a movie. Ka Whawhai Tonu (Struggle Without End) is the cinematic equivalent of a hundred metal bands thrashing under a forest of burning trees. Death, doom, desperation, and defiance in the face of obliteration are the themes, kids. That’s not boring, that is metal. There is also a warning about how disturbing the images are going to be. No one is kidding about this; you are going to see brutality and cruelty beyond comprehension. It isn’t a pretty picture at all, which once again is very metal.