Allow me to be perfectly frank and explain the film in the way that I interpreted it. Mel Gibson has no interest whatsoever in the Mayan culture. He does not want to explore their ways on film. He never gets down to explore the nature of violence between them. He wants to explore the violence of nature amongst them. Here is a director who is altogether mesmerized by bloodlust as seen in all of his previous directorial efforts, and it aptly translates into the gruesome gore seen in "Apocalypto". Over and over again.
In one of the first scenes of the film, a band of Mayan hunters track down and kill a tapir in the lush Yucutan jungle. When they sit down to feast on the prey, some of the guys convince a fellow hunter called Blunted to eat the animal's testicles to cure his infertility. Soon they all crack up and confess they were pulling his leg. Next comes a penis joke. Mel Gibson uses this type of locker-room humour to ground the otherwise alien Mayan culture and make us nod with recognition, clumsily telling us that "they are just like you and me". That is by far the most advanced anthropological angle taken in "Apocalypto" and it shows the laziness with which Gibson and Safinia approached the story.
The remaining depiction is of the decline of the Mayan empire due to internal rivalry between tribes, as told in the prelude by a Will Durant quote: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." No satisfactory explanation as to why or how this happens is ever offered, for Gibson is too preoccupied with brainless bloodshed, other than the leering faces of the caricatures of villains in foreign tribes who go to great lengths to punish warriors and sacrifice humans for their gods.
One of these is young family man Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) who is captured and brought to a warring city, ready to be made a human sacrifice in one of their temples. By what can only be described as a fluke and apt physique, he manages to flee and sets off into the jungle to save his pregnant wife and his son who hid themselves in a well near their home-town and cannot climb up again and it's starting to rain. Inexplicably, the evil villains chase Jaguar Paw through the whole jungle, over waterfalls, across mudpits, etc.
Mel Gibson may be a crazed redneck, but when he finally divorces his highbrow introspective style from adrenaline-pumping cat-and-mouse action in the jungle, "Apocalypto" receives a well-deserved kick up the arse and switches to heartstopping manhunt mode. It becomes "Predator" or "Mad Max" in the Yucutan jungle, and is fully passable because of it. You could make a good case for the exploitation and over-dosage of blood & gore in the film and at the risk of sounding un-PC, this film made me pretty disgusted with Mayans. At one point, "Apocalypto" is almost disturbingly violent, brutal, gory and bloodthirsty for no other reason than to instill the "bad guy" image in our evil-laughing villains.
On the action side of the spectrum, "Apocalypto" succeeds very well. There is the usual no character development, only here is stretches across 2+ hours. The lead character is your usual gazes-in-disbelief protagonist, but it's all so lowbrow you cannot help but appreciate it. If you do not mind a bit of gaping wounds, internal organs being ripped out, piercing in the most random and painful places, human sacrifices, animals fights, gushing streams of blood, open arteries, bony freaks of nature, face-munching by panthers, gutting of animals, gruesome bloodbaths, torture games, rotting corpses, self-mutilation and last but not least, death by killer bees, this film may be for you.
My one regret with the film is that is cannot decide if it wants to opt for and clumsily pends between both: 1) hard-boiled action with superb crisp direction and exotic sets or 2) high-brow cultural/religious exploration of a civilization with lead-footed direction. Needless to say, "Apocalypto" fares infinitely better when Mel Gibson stick to the former approach, something that is true of all his films.
6 out of 10
In one of the first scenes of the film, a band of Mayan hunters track down and kill a tapir in the lush Yucutan jungle. When they sit down to feast on the prey, some of the guys convince a fellow hunter called Blunted to eat the animal's testicles to cure his infertility. Soon they all crack up and confess they were pulling his leg. Next comes a penis joke. Mel Gibson uses this type of locker-room humour to ground the otherwise alien Mayan culture and make us nod with recognition, clumsily telling us that "they are just like you and me". That is by far the most advanced anthropological angle taken in "Apocalypto" and it shows the laziness with which Gibson and Safinia approached the story.
The remaining depiction is of the decline of the Mayan empire due to internal rivalry between tribes, as told in the prelude by a Will Durant quote: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." No satisfactory explanation as to why or how this happens is ever offered, for Gibson is too preoccupied with brainless bloodshed, other than the leering faces of the caricatures of villains in foreign tribes who go to great lengths to punish warriors and sacrifice humans for their gods.
One of these is young family man Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) who is captured and brought to a warring city, ready to be made a human sacrifice in one of their temples. By what can only be described as a fluke and apt physique, he manages to flee and sets off into the jungle to save his pregnant wife and his son who hid themselves in a well near their home-town and cannot climb up again and it's starting to rain. Inexplicably, the evil villains chase Jaguar Paw through the whole jungle, over waterfalls, across mudpits, etc.
Mel Gibson may be a crazed redneck, but when he finally divorces his highbrow introspective style from adrenaline-pumping cat-and-mouse action in the jungle, "Apocalypto" receives a well-deserved kick up the arse and switches to heartstopping manhunt mode. It becomes "Predator" or "Mad Max" in the Yucutan jungle, and is fully passable because of it. You could make a good case for the exploitation and over-dosage of blood & gore in the film and at the risk of sounding un-PC, this film made me pretty disgusted with Mayans. At one point, "Apocalypto" is almost disturbingly violent, brutal, gory and bloodthirsty for no other reason than to instill the "bad guy" image in our evil-laughing villains.
On the action side of the spectrum, "Apocalypto" succeeds very well. There is the usual no character development, only here is stretches across 2+ hours. The lead character is your usual gazes-in-disbelief protagonist, but it's all so lowbrow you cannot help but appreciate it. If you do not mind a bit of gaping wounds, internal organs being ripped out, piercing in the most random and painful places, human sacrifices, animals fights, gushing streams of blood, open arteries, bony freaks of nature, face-munching by panthers, gutting of animals, gruesome bloodbaths, torture games, rotting corpses, self-mutilation and last but not least, death by killer bees, this film may be for you.
My one regret with the film is that is cannot decide if it wants to opt for and clumsily pends between both: 1) hard-boiled action with superb crisp direction and exotic sets or 2) high-brow cultural/religious exploration of a civilization with lead-footed direction. Needless to say, "Apocalypto" fares infinitely better when Mel Gibson stick to the former approach, something that is true of all his films.
6 out of 10