Apocalypto (2006)

June 23, 2007, 0:52Logan

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At the heart of heart of Mel Gibson’s tale of the downfall and collapse of the Ancient Mayan culture is the story of Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young warrior living in a peaceful village where hunting and making babies appear to be the primary occupations. Jaguar Paw has gotten off to a good start: his wife, Seven (Dalia Hernandez), has given birth once and is pregnant with a second child. Still, Jaguar Paw has a distance to go to match the size of his father’s family. Flint Sky (Morris Birdyellowhead) has ten children. The village’s peace is shattered when a war party arrives from the center of Mayan civilization. The armed men torture, kill, rape, and maim. Jaguar Paw is able to protect his wife and their son by placing them in a deep cistern before he is captured and forced to march through the jungle. At the end of the journey lies the great temple and the prospect of being sacrificed to appease the Sun God. He must find some way to escape his impending doom and race back to save his family from certain death before the rains come.

Director: Mel Gibson
Rated: R for numerous sequences of graphic violence, disturbing images, nudity, and some profanity.
Running Time: 138 minutes

I surely thought this film was going to be a disaster. From the beginning, it was written off by Hollywood as a pretentious, vanity project paid for by the industry surprising gains of “The Passion of the Christ.”

During production, there were stories of calamities on the Mexico location, and editing problems that moved its release date from summer to Christmas. Then came Gibson’s drunken, anti-Semitic rant, and the fact that it contains no recognizable actors (much less stars), subtitled dialog spoken entirely in Yucatec Maya and a story line that’s non-stop violence, it’s hardly the recipe for an audience or critical hit.

But it’s no disaster. For all its excesses, it’s an absorbing, disturbing, savagely beautiful “trip” movie, and an outrageous personal vision of a great actor and film-maker.

To say that the movie is over the top is a vast understatement. Gibson creates a world of almost unimaginable cruelty, brutality and inhumanity, and Jaguar Paw’s journey is filled with more cliffhanger situations than “MacGyver”

Indeed, the movie’s world is so extreme that it’s almost ludicrous. And yet, through Gibson’s epic filmmaking, it’s also so bizarrely alien, so visually stunning, so interesting in every frame that it’s totally hypnotic.

“Apocalypto” is also a movie with a disturbing psychological impact. Like the better films of Stanley Kubrick and David Lean, it takes us on a unique odyssey and leaves us with an uneasiness that is difficult to sort out.

If all the movie represents is a lot of pretty scenery and well executed action sequences, there would be nothing distinguishing about Apocalypto. However the film is mostly successful in transporting the viewer to another age: the costumes, the body markings, the fierce Mayan masks, all feel right. And keeping the dialog in subtitles was a smart move. Even better are the faces, which never fail to fascinate.

However, despite the film’s two-hour-plus running time, the characters are never particularly developed; Gibson is working with archetypes, not real people, and he could just as easily have named his characters Family Man and Pregnant Wife. While the “archetype approach” may make the movie more accessible, it also distances us emotionally from Jaguar Paw’s plight; we object to the sacking of his village on principle, but not necessarily because we feel any connection to him as a person.

And for all the anthropological research that went into the movie, what is “Apocalypto” trying to say? According to the production notes, Gibson wants us to contemplate the parallels between the decadence of the Mayan empire on its last legs and our contemporary, spiritually and environmentally ravaged world. You could have fooled me.

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“Apocalypto” begins with an intriguing quote from Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” This might lead you to expect an exploration of the erosion and extinction of the mighty Mayan empire. But this is not to be. The only aspects of the Mayans’ culture that fire Gibson’s imagination are the blood sacrifices held atop their imposing stone pyramids. The victims’ blood is meant to appease the gods and end the drought and disease plaguing the land. The director spares us no detail of this exotically savage ritual, as our captive tribe members are painted blue and held down on a stone slab while, to the cheering mobs below, their beating hearts are carved out of their chests and held aloft. This is followed by swift decapitation, and the spectacle of severed heads tossed down the steps, followed by the headless carcasses. The director wants you to know he disapproves of this.

Jaguar Paw manages to escape the High Priest’s dagger, but more dangers await as, pursued by soldiers, he tries to wend his way home, where his pregnant mate, Seven (Dalia Hernandez), and son are trapped in the bottom of a pit. In its second, even gorier, half, “Apocalypto” becomes a straight-ahead chase movie. Some of this is quite thrilling. Gibson knows how to direct a great action scene, and he and his co-writer, Farhad Safina, are inexhaustibly inventive in conjuring fresh ways for victims to meet their end. Dramatically, however, the relentless pileup of atrocities becomes self-defeating. At a certain point—was it the spear that went from the back of a running man’s head through his mouth? The jaguar tearing another man’s face to shreds? The snakes? The hornets? The hundreds of rotting corpses in the ravine?—you become immune. The harder “Apocalypto” works to shock and excite you, the less shocked and excited you become, until you may find yourself beset by the urge to giggle.

Speaking of giggles, the first quarter of the movie, in which we are introduced to our familial tribe, is loaded with sophomoric humor which wouldn’t be out of place in “Porky’s” or “American Pie.” A typical nagging mother-in-law and many of the tribe’s men take pleasure in teasing and pulling practical jokes upon one of the tribe’s members who is experiencing fertility problems with his wife. This humor adds nothing to the story but the token comedy-relief. However the only real relief comes at the end of the movie when we see the emergence of the Spanish conquistadors and the hope springs that perhaps the violence and bloodshed is over.

Perhaps that is the point of the move in itself. Maybe the violence to a point of overload is meant to make us draw parallels to our own day. Have we been so dulled to the excesses of our own culture that we don’t see that we are on the verge of collapse? Is it time to look for a fresh start?

I gave it a rating of “Dialog” because I believe that deep under all of the violence there really is a beautiful story of love and determination which is valued no matter the sacrifice. I wouldn’t let my kids see this movie until they were at least 15 and able to put the violence in its historical perspective. But among mature adults who don’t mind squinting through some of the particularly disturbing moments there is good discussion to be had, not just about this tremendous film-maker but also about the story which he has presented to us.

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