Mel Gibson trades The Passion of the Christ’s hooked noses for noses decorated by hooks (and a character named “Curl Nose”) with Apocalypto, though don’t let that fool you into thinking that the controversial director has given up on religious mythmaking. An epic about the fall of the Mayan empire populated predominately by unprofessional actors and shot in a subtitled Mayan dialect, Gibson’s follow-up to his hugely popular and divisive crucifixation saga is bursting with spirituality rooted both in primitive polytheism – his protagonists regularly thanking or beseeching ancient Gods – and distinctly Christian imagery, to the point that its hero Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) receives a Jesus-like wound to the side as he valiantly attempts to save his family from impending destruction. The specter of doom certainly hangs over the film, which traces the world-shattering ordeal of Jaguar Paw and his fellow Mayan villagers after their homes are burned to the ground, countless are slaughtered, and the rest are captured and taken to the heart of the kingdom, where the women are sold into slavery and the men offered as human sacrifices to a god in return for respite from poor crops and the lethal pestilence sweeping the land.
Apocalypto’s sociological portrait of its extinct culture has been lavishly conceived by Gibson, which never matches The New World’s aura of poetic authenticity but nonetheless has a lived-in realism that – by lacking any measure of exploitative exoticism – remains both alluring and convincing regardless of how many liberties may have been taken with regards to historical accuracy. With fallen warriors removing their necklaces before succumbing to death, a mother healing her son’s leg wound by inserting live ants into the gash, or the horrific sight of decapitated heads plummeting down a towering temple’s steps, the film gracefully taps into a sense of competing rituals between the “urban” oppressors and “rural” innocents whose conflict stands at the narrative’s center. The relationship between men and their ancestors, as well as the importance of maintaining long-held customs, is an omnipresent factor throughout. Such bonds certainly stand in direct opposition to the Mayan rulers’ callous use and abuse of their fellow brothers and sisters, with Gibson’s consistent depiction of their cruel mistreatment of the sick, the elderly, and the young speaking to the foreboding introductory quote from William Durant that “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.”
Is Mel analogizing his version of the downfall of the (decadent, greedy, and consumed by corrosive fear) Mayans with the modern West? The director has suggested as much in interviews, but if so, his political argument is akin to a street corner soapbox preacher bellowing about the end of times through a megaphone. Mercifully, though, any intended contemporary parallels – which are largely rendered moot by a final image [Spoiler Alert] that makes clear that, regardless of their moral decay, the Mayans were destined for doom by the coming of the Spanish – are severely underplayed in favor of action movie clichés. That’s right – Apocalypto, for all its exacting attention to period detail, is at heart something of an extravagantly staged chase flick, one in which Jaguar, pursued while trying to return to the pregnant wife and child he hid from his enemies at the bottom of a deep hole, must leap off a waterfall to escape his adversaries à la The Fugitive, and later, must defeat the villains’ psycho second-in-command with a super-cool Matrix-y move shot in slow-motion. The film is overflowing with hackneyed but thrilling blockbuster-familiar moments, the majority of which, in another context, could have proven entirely comfortable in a mid-‘80s Schwarzenegger vehicle (come to think of it, even the Governator’s “I’ll be back” line would have been appropriate).
Any chance that such adherence to outsized Hollywood tropes might make the film formulaic, however, is largely squashed by the director’s affection for bizarre allegory – which most hilariously comes in the form of a climactic birth that occurs underwater while the mother is about to drown – and gruesomeness, the latter of which will come as no surprise to those who endured The Passion’s New Testament bloodbath. An intro prank involving the eating of a wild boar’s testicles, a Temple of Doom-style centerpiece involving a ruler’s sacrificial removal of a man’s still-beating heart (which he then shows to the unfortunate soul), and a gratuitously extended circular camera pan around a warrior’s bludgeoned head as it spurts blood like a geyser – Gibson is obsessed with liberation and triumph through human (bodily) suffering to the point of laughableness. Yet such excessive violence ultimately serves the director’s own faith-through-torment convictions no more than it does standard genre obligations, as Apocalypto never transcends its fundamental nature as a regally decorated, efficiently paced rock-‘em, sock-‘em adventure – a status apparent right through to its finale, which does less to impart weighty thematic ideas than to provide a handy set-up for that most hoary of action film clichés: the sequel.
It's weird to think that the guy who did Braveheart would get *more* bloodthirsty as he started making religious films.
P.S. I crack up every time I see your header with Rowdy Roddy Piper
Posted by: josephgrossberg | December 03, 2006 at 08:25 PM
Gibson's infatuation with gore is strange considering how (relatively) recent it seems to be - before 1995's Braveheart, no one would have thought him obsessed with excessive bloodshed.
Apocalypto, however, seems to cement the idea that he really does ENJOY depicting bloody violence. And to think, this is a guy who's also passionate about the Three Stooges....
(And glad you like the header, Joe. I too enjoy seeing Piper every time I update the site)
Posted by: Nick | December 03, 2006 at 10:22 PM
Thanks for spoiling the movie for me. Very professional.
Posted by: Tlaloc | December 03, 2006 at 10:29 PM
Tlaloc,
You know how to avoid having a movie spoiled for you? Don't read reviews before seeing it. If you wanted to simply know whether I liked it or not - without any specific details - my B- grade should have sufficed.
Of course, regardless of that piece of advice, I included a Spoiler Alert for those who didn't want to read about the film's conclusion. So if you had the ending ruined for you, it's your own fault.
Posted by: Nick | December 03, 2006 at 10:35 PM
I saw the spoiler alert, and disregarded it knowing well what I was getting into (and really, I've never imaged seeing Apocalypto for the story). Sure, everyone sometimes slips up and includes a spoiler without meaning to, but eesh.
Posted by: rob | December 04, 2006 at 07:59 AM
You're right, Rob, that spoilers are sometimes included by accident. But the truth is that any substantial piece of film criticism invariably spoils some element of the film - there's virtually no way to write a long review of a movie without giving away SOME plot point that SOME reader will consider a "spoiler."
The best way to avoid having a movie ruined for you ahead of time is to avoid reading reviews. That's certainly what I do...
Posted by: Nick | December 04, 2006 at 09:28 AM
I've spent the last two hours reading reviews of this movie. Yours is one of only two that I have so far come across that is not all love or, as is mostly the case, all hate. Refreshing and helpful. Thank you.
Posted by: Nomi | December 08, 2006 at 03:40 PM
ah, I find it quite comical how everyone on here jumps on the "Mel Gibson is bloodthirsty" bandwagon. Grow up, numerous amount of Scorsese, Tarantino, Cronenbergh films are just as graphic, where's the finger pointing there? Mel Gibson is a visionary filmmaker, he doesn't embrace or exploit violence, he shows violence as a part of our history. "Apocalypto" and "The Passion of the Christ" were both extraordinary films of vision and grace.
Posted by: Rob Butler | December 13, 2006 at 03:28 AM
"he doesn't embrace or exploit violence"
I've only seen The Passion and Braveheart (as Apocalypto seems to take things to new levels), but that statement is where most of us would disagree with you. Gibson certainly is visionary, but he is ten times more a craftsman than an artist.
Posted by: rob | December 13, 2006 at 09:50 AM
I've noticed that you reprise the exploitative exoticism factor as a criticism often, and in this review you praise the film for being free of it. Couldn't one argue however that the film is exotically exploitative for taking an exotic culture from the past and melding it to modern action-adventure storytelling/filmmaking tropes while also presenting the culture and its people as being both more primitive and more savage than the evidence suggests, primarily for the purpose of contrasting with the arrival of the (in Mel's head) comparatively civilized Catholic conquistadors?
Posted by: Dennis | December 13, 2006 at 02:11 PM
Here's an interesting parallel with Christianity (SPOILERS): http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/12/apocalypto.html
Posted by: Joe Grossberg | December 15, 2006 at 11:25 AM
Dennis,
Sorry for not replying sooner - wrote this up days ago, but forgot to actually post it. Nonetheless...
The reason I didn't find Gibson's portrait of the Mayans to be exploitative is that the film never succumbs to using their unique appearances, customs, language, etc. for crass entertainment purposes (such as might have been the case had their nose-bones and strange garb been used solely as a means of spooking white Western viewers). I thing Gibson shows real affection for the Mayans, painting them not just as bloodthirsty monsters, but with a variety of complex (positive and negative) attributes.
The fact that such period detail is lavished on a cliched action film may indicate a lack of imagination on Gibson's part. But because I think Gibson really is interested in his characters and setting, the melding of the two didn't, in and of itself, strike me as offensive. But I know what you're getting at.
Whether said period details are factual isn't really for me to say - though the fiilm seems scrupulously researched, I'll leave such analysis up to Mayan experts.
But I don't think he favorably contrasts the Spanish with the Mayans. On the contrary, the arrival of the Spanish is meant to be a bad thing for the Mayans and, specifically, the heroic Jaguar Claw and his family - both of whom Gibson greatly sympathizes with.
Posted by: Nick | December 16, 2006 at 10:04 PM