Posted on 12/08/2006 1:21:21 PM PST by Lorianne
Starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Birdyellowhead, Carlos Emilio Baez. Written by Mel Gibson and Farhad Safinia. Directed by Mel Gibson.
Mel Gibson's new movie is a dubiously cautionary historical spectacle that gushes along on torrents of blood.
A speculative fable on the fall of Mayan civilization with its eye allegedly cocked toward present geopolitical troubles, Apocalypto will strike some as a comment on the imminent collapse of global society as we know it, and others as a sign that it's already a done deal — surely, this is exactly the kind of gory amusement that jazzed the Romans just before the Empire bit the dust of the Coliseum.
Either way, for the strong of stomach and forgiving of blunt unsubtlety, it will probably prove orgasmic.
Like Gibson's previous two splatter epics, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto fuses a highly speculative sense of history with primal emotional manipulation rendered in state-of-the art technological know-how. Prepare yourself to see not only a heart ripped from a human chest, but a still-beating heart. And get ready to finally know what dozens of freshly lopped heads bouncing down the majestic stone staircase of a monumental Mayan temple actually looks (and sounds) like.
If, as a filmmaker, the obviously soul-stricken former movie star is an unabashed red-meat primitivist, he's also become an undeniably polished one. Considered purely in popcorn terms, Apocalypto plays like a mid-'30s Saturday afternoon jungle serial as made by some unholy genetic scrambling of John Woo and David Lean. With a bit of Ayn Rand tossed in.
Borrowing a lick as time-tested as D.W. Griffith, Gibson opens his movie in an idyllic Mayan jungle village, circa the late 15th century — just prior to the arrival of the European ships — where our hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood, one of a Yucatec Maya-speaking cast consisting entirely of native performers) enjoys all manner of jocular, guy's-guy practical jokes with his pals. This includes convincing one especially gullible lunk to put some wickedly irritating spice on his Johnson to enhance sexual performance.
Gibson, nothing if not frat-house friendly, not only shows the predictably painful results, but cuts to traces of the offending powder on the poor woman's lips just for good yahoo measure. This display of prelapsarian hijinks, combined with the fact that Jaguar Paw deeply loves his son and pregnant wife Seven (Dalia Hernandez), is our indication not only that these are childlike people bathed in the light of innocent and good, but that like buffalo grazing on the open plain, they're ripe for atrocity.
Which arrives — and how — in the form of a colourfully accessorized barbarian army from the Mayan city. They're seeking sacrificial fodder to appease the gods — whom the ruling class has opted to scapegoat for the famine created by the environmental disaster imposed by building the temples. The plunderers, led by Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo) and Snake Ink (Rodolfo Palacios), are visions of pagan brutality covered in tattoos and bearing such adornments as multiple piercings and loincloths with a human skull emblazoned on the crotch. (Just wait for it on Queen West.)
After an orgy of mutilation, murder, dismemberment and rape (all of which is generously visualized by Gibson) the eligible lambs are tied up and dragged, like a veritable daisy chain of Christs being led to Calvary — halfway across the continent to be relieved of heart and head in the name of a corrupt and lying ruling class. And, it should be added, a really good show.
Because all this, as rousingly shocking as it is, is merely prelude to Gibson's awesomely spectacular centrepiece — the heart of the movie in more ways that one — which is the mass sacrifice conducted at the top of the looming Mayan temple for the shrieking enjoyment of the cast-of-thousands mob assembled below. And, it might be noted, in the multiplex.
While heads roll like bloodied and bewigged bowling balls down the endless steps, the gore-soaked priests prepare their victims for the removal of their still-pounding hearts from their still-living bodies. And Jaguar Paw, awaiting his turn, looks on with perfectly reasonable trepidation.
As fantastically rendered as this sequence is, it also begs the question of just how sincere Gibson's motives are. After all, if the visually gorgeous Apocalypto is, as the director has claimed, a cautionary metaphor for the doomsday-summoning weapons of mass distraction deployed by the current American administration, what are we to make of the fact that the movie is providing for us precisely what this mammoth carnival of carnage is doing for all those yelping Mayans? Or the fact that this is so obviously the movie's most deliriously entertaining — and meticulously assembled — passage?
But never mind, for as soon as you can say deus ex machina, a celestial event occurs which allows Jaguar Paw to escape and Apocalypto to charge into its third act: the chasing of Jaguar Paw through the jungle toward the pit where he has stashed his wife (and soon-to-be graphically born baby) for safekeeping and also for the satisfaction of the near unslakable thirst for revenge the movie has so potently instilled in its viewers.
And, as it must, it comes, but only after we've been treated to such further assaultive delights as attacks by giant, four-legged predators, the sight of bodies being pulverized on rocks below a waterfall and the satisfying staving-in of numerous priestly skulls.
If the rumours are true that Apocalypto's release was delayed in order to put some distance between the opening weekend box-office receipts and the director's notorious, cocktail-enhanced anti-Semitic rant at a California roadside last summer, the fear was probably groundless. Unleashed at any time, Apocalypto was probably bound to be a hit. (Possible sequel: Gibson's take on the historical Caribbean, Apocalypso.) Perhaps even a bigger one than the exercise in high-piety Biblical Grand Guignol that was The Passion of the Christ.
Unburdened by that movie's divisive Christian fundamentalist elements — and the allegations of anti-Semitism — Apocalypto is free to be just what the masses would seem to be clamouring for during these end-of-days: a big, fat, blood-drenched spectacle disguised as a lesson best learned before it is repeated. Based on the evidence on screen, it would seem we've already failed the class.
"The greater the blood, the greater the redemption." That's the key to many of Mel's stories. Apocalypto reminded me of the life- and family-affirming center of The Patriot and Braveheart. It's even stronger here--although the negative critics overlooked it.
"Storge" is the Greek word for the love between family members. "Philia" is the love between good friends. Mel brightly illuminates these virtues against the dark canvas of the Mayan culture of death. Post-modern moral equivalency doesn't want to treat the virtues (love, courage) and the struggle against real evil as serious themes. Mel does, and they ding him for it every time.
This movie won't be well received by the Brahmin caste in the blue states. Well, they'll be eating their heart outs over this incredible artistic (and probable boxoffice) success!
....And in a few days, Our Lady of Guadelupe will be celibrated.
Good. Almost fun. Kinduva twofer, really. I found the first hour fascinating in a National Geographic Special kind of way. And the last hour as a good, inverted remake of Predator.
This happens every time a movie with ANY sort of buzz hits the theaters. It's gotten to the point that if your movie appears on the radar of these sorts of fringe groups, you can be sure that everyone knows about your movie and that the marketing arm did its job.
I thought that would be the ending. Historically, incorrect. The Mayan civilization had "disappeared" centuries before any Spaniard had been born, though the Maya are still alive today. Around 900 AD their civilization just ceased, and historians are not sure just why. War, famine, disease, many possibilities, but nothing concrete.......The Aztecs were who Cortez met, not the Mayas..........
Do not accept dinner invitation from SaltyJoe........
.......Based on the evidence on screen, it would seem we've already failed the class.......
I would take a contrariand view. The fact is, there has been historical success.
Jesus was crucified and ended the need for human sacrifice.
Mel made a movie making the actual spectacle historically unnecessary.
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