Your enjoyment of “The Other Side of Heaven,” about a young, fresh-faced Mormon missionary who travels to the remote Tongan islands in the South Pacific during the 1950s, depends greatly on your appetite for wholesome family entertainment and your immediate reaction to proselytizing.

The film is absolutely unswaying in its determination to show conversion of an indigenous people to Mormonism as an important endeavor. If the idea of the white man arriving on foreign shores to show wary natives the true light is abhorrent to you, the simplistic “Heaven” will quite likely be more like hell.

Based on the memoir, “In the Eye of the Storm,” “The Other Side of Heaven” follows John Groberg (Christopher Gorham) across the ocean to an island where no one speaks his language or has ever seen a white man. John leaves behind an extraordinarily patient fiancee, Jean (Anne Hathaway, “The Princess Diaries”), whose role is primarily to wait for John’s two-year stint in the Pacific to be over.

In the meantime, they exchange remarkably uninteresting love letters while John learns the language by reading the Bible in four days. He also performs a miracle to earn the trust of the islanders. Gorham is likable, but we never really understand why John is considered such a great teacher because we never really see or hear his teachings.

There are certain things required in such a film: a rival minister who warns his flock not to trust the newcomer; a moment in which the missionary will prove his mettle and God’s strength (in this case by walking on rat-gnawed feet); a big storm that wreaks havoc on a simple village; a friend’s death that teaches the missionary about suffering. These elements and others equally predetermined are present; and a predictability overtakes the film despite a dogged earnestness overall and even a fairly realistic storm scene.

Yet, even to a charitable viewer, “The Other Side of Heaven” will feel like a piece of propaganda.