What Christian message is being conveyed powerfully in Apocalypto?
Gibson has had a vast slew of movies that he's directed or starred in that have been commercial successes. ONE of those movies conveyed a Christian message.
If anything, this suggests that Passion was a success because Gibson was attached to it, not the subject matter, though people won't want to hear that.
The profound bonds between the members of a family.
How, without a church, greed and violence come to rule unchecked.
The necessity for the values of Western civilization.
The abomination of sacrifice of the innocent.
The need to value the aging when they are past their usefulness.
The requirement that freedom be defended--that righteousness does not mean lying down like a doormat.
The sinfulness of singling someone out for ridicule (Blunt, who is the brunt of everyone's practical jokes).
The scene where the village elder tells a story, of how man has an empty place inside him that can never be filled. A Christian would say it was a Jesus-shaped space and that it can be filled. But there are no Christians there, ergo no one to tell people how to fill up that space. The elder went as far as he could go with his wisdom.
There's probably a lot more too.
Gibson's company, Icon, also had something to do with an excellent claymation retelling of the Christ story. Called "The Miracle Maker." I've got it. Very good indeed.
That the Catholic Spanish were right to crush the Aztec civilization like they did?
The story juxtaposes a moral culture of life against a moral culture of death. In Catholic theology, Mary is the mother of the body of Christ. In the story Jaguar Paw and his trib are the culture of life and would represent her children...before they were born. The Aztec/Mayans (IMO calling them Mayans is a brilliant move) would represent the other side, those who have given in to Satanic forces. Therefore this is a battle between the woman and her (preborn) offspring and the serpent and his (Gen 3:15- 1st reading on the feast day) .
Unlike others I think Gibson took ethnic culture off the table completely by making every character in the story "Mayan". I saw nothing taking a position about Western Civ.
The structure of the story seems chaiastic; revolving around a prayer from a desperate woman to a tender spirit mother for the sake of her children. This is a prayer that to any believing Catholic can only be answered by one woman.
“Holy Mother of God and of the Church, our Lady of Guadalupe, you were chosen by the Father for the Son through the Holy Spirit. You are the Woman clothed with the sun who labors to give birth to Christ while Satan, the Red Dragon, waits to voraciously devour your child.” http://www.sancta.org/patr-unb.html) Go to that website and look at the images and compare them to the images of Apocalypto and I think you'll start to see the worldview being expressed. .
(note - Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Marian apparition of Juan Diego, is Patroness of the America's and also of the unborn)
Gosh I don't know, that perhaps there is no amoral vacuum in the world. If there's not good present, evil fills in like a strong mastic. That after all the carnage and horror these people endured, they are met by men who had no idea what was happening in that forest before they stepped foot on the land. These men represented reason and a new beginning. It was a ruthless de-romanticizing of the pagan life. It was a strong unmistakeable message to me but maybe I was looking for it.