Under a Jarvis Moon (2010)
There is a whole worldview packed into a single administrative decision, and Under a Jarvis Moon builds its best argument from exactly that. In the 1930s and 40s, the United States government needed young men willing to be shipped out to Jarvis, Howland and Baker, three specks of coral and scrub sitting almost entirely alone in the deep Pacific. The men they chose were mostly indigenous Hawaiians, barely out of military school, and the reasoning was straightforward to the point of being chilling: they would be "used to it." That assumption, so casually held, so plainly wrong, is the film's beating heart, and it earns its place there.
I came to this the way I come to most things now, by following films from the furthest corners of the map. This one completes for me the United States Minor Outlying Islands, a region whose only other entry I had managed to track down was Operation Dominic. The two films could hardly be further apart in sensibility. That one was the US government narrating its own nuclear tests with the flat calm of a training manual, all fact and no feeling. This one hands the microphone to the men themselves, now old, and simply lets them talk. The difference in what you come away knowing, and more importantly feeling, is enormous.
What the film does remarkably well is hold two things in tension at once. The attitudes and decisions on display are badly dated and often plainly unjust. The documentary does not soften that, does not look away from it, does not offer a consoling gloss. And yet it never loses sight of the dignity of the people sitting in front of the camera. That is not an easy balance to strike. A lot of documentaries either let history off the hook or let righteous anger crowd out the human detail. This one manages to do neither, and in those interview sequences it genuinely moves.
Made for PBS Hawaii and released in 2010, it is the kind of film that almost certainly passed most people by, which is a shame. The subject, young men colonising uninhabited islands on behalf of a government that viewed them as naturally suited to hardship, is a story worth knowing. The Pacific has no shortage of forgotten chapters, and if you find yourself drawn to that part of the world, Australia's Forgotten Islands covers related ground from a different angle and is well worth your time alongside this.
Where Under a Jarvis Moon falls slightly short is in variety. The subject is genuinely fascinating, but the treatment is fairly one-note throughout, and at around an hour it began to feel its length before the end. It circles the same beats a few times too many, and a tighter cut would have left the whole thing sharper and more urgent. That is a real criticism, not a nitpick, because the material deserves better than to occasionally feel like it is marking time.
Still, a small complaint against what is, in the end, a valuable and moving record of a chapter of history that deserves not to be forgotten. The men who went out to those islands were asked to do something genuinely extraordinary, were given almost nothing in return, and were chosen partly because someone in an office decided their background made them expendable. The film remembers that on their behalf, and does so with care. Three stars, and another worthwhile dispatch from a place most maps barely bother to mark.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2026-09-04
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Under a Jarvis Moon (2010) on YouTube
