Director: Mel Gibson
Writer: Mel Gibson, Farhad Safinia
Starring: Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez and Jonathan Brewer
As a director, Mel Gibson is at least as fond of blood and gore as Michael Bay, director of The Rock and The Island, is of explosions. While Gibson’s latest movie features a decent amount of mutilated organs and pumping blood, it is nowhere near as gory as The Passion of the Christ or even Braveheart. Also, like the aforementioned Michael Bay films, Apocalypto lacks realism or emotional resonance, but it’s one hell of an action flick.
This is the story of Jaguar Paw, a young man from a village in the jungles of the Yucatan before the time of European colonization. His family and his village hunt the forests nearby, and live a simple, happy life. Then they are attacked by a small army of slightly more advanced people—presumably Mayans, though this is never specified. Jaguar Paw, along with all fit men and women, is taken captive. He and the other captives are forced march to march day and night until they reach a pyramidal city of stone, where they are either sold as slaves or offered as sacrifices. Jaguar Paw’s son and wife, who is pregnant, are left behind; trapped in a stone pit near the village.
The story is relatively simple: an everyman character is taken from his familiar surroundings and forced to fight his way home to save his family. It is the simplicity of this plot that allows Gibson to focus on the details of his story. We get to know Jaguar Paw and the people of his village well before the Mayans attack. We get to see every arduous step of his journey to the Mayan city, and, yes, the gory details of the human sacrifices and bloody battles.
While Gibson has been criticized for the violence in Apocalypto, this film is not nearly as bloody as his two previous films, and Gibson pulls a lot of punches; letting a great deal of violence happen off-screen. That is not to say that Apocalypto is not incredibly gory. Blood sprays and human hearts are displayed openly a number of times. But the carnage in this film is nothing compared to the bloody flagellation featured in The Passion of The Christ.
Again like Michael Bay’s movies, there are points that defy all realism. Characters receive life-threatening wounds, but keep running and fighting like Olympic athletes. The sheer feats accomplished in this film often seem impossible. That said, the third act of Apocalypto is one long chase scene, and, Realism aside, Gibson somehow manages to keep all forty minutes interesting. He mixes up the events, and throws an infinite number of obstacles in Jaguar Paw’s direction. The action is impressive, and it is unrelentingly intense.
Unfortunately, the intensity and the lack of realism take away from the emotional impact. This should be an emotionally resonant film. Since his directorial debut with The Man Without a Face, Gibson has been notorious for tugging at audiences’ heartstrings. Apocalypto is a fine action movie, but it has no heart to back up its intensity. That’s fine though, since with Apocalypto, Gibson reaches for a sense of prophecy and allegory, which extends beyond emotional manipulation. He sets up the idea of prophecy with a dream sequence and with a prophetic, plague-infested girl. His social allegory to American society is not-so-subtly expressed through his representation of Maya culture, and through a deus ex machine technique, which comes at the end of the story.
The characters in Apocalypto all speak the Mayan dialect, which, while probably not historically accurate (and there are plenty of aspects of this movie that are not), is a welcome reprieve from other, too-common historical epics like Enemy at the Gates, which assume that all people outside of modern America speak perfect English with elevated British accents. Overall, this is a fine action movie with some intelligence and no shortage of intensity.
Casey Cosker lives, reads, writes, and occasionally studies at Pratt Institute in New York City. He spends his free time and money buying comic books and novels he can’t afford. He has been a self-proclaimed geek for several months now, and has no intention of changing his ways. He also has a hat.