Parents' Guide to Last Stand of the Javan Rhino

This film fits alongside many other nature documentaries in that it has excellent footage and good production value. As a result, it does at least a superficially effective job at opening viewers' mind to a wider world beyond themselves. Last Stand of the Javan Rhino adds on an urgent message as well, urging viewers to reconsider their actions that possibly help enable some of the activities -- like poaching -- that contribute to the Javan rhinos' critically endangered population. In the end, it stands as a 15-minute testament to one camera crew's journey to photograph and thus help the critically endangered species.

The documentary's main problem concerns the dynamic between its two main human characters, wherein the White narrator controls the entire narrative while following a native Javan man (Mita Kasmiti) who actually knows where he's going in the Ujung Kulan National Forest and does the actual work of tracking the native Javan rhinos still in existence. Even though it makes sense for the documentary to be geared towards an English-speaking audience, because the English-speaking world has the size and material resources to help the Javan rhino's plight, the documentary could have at least provided subtitles while still allowing Mita to speak and give some control of the narrative. In the end, however, the human dynamic isn't the main focus of Last Stand of the Javan Rhino, which does an effective job at articulating the urgency of the work that must be done to help the critically endangered species.