'Apocalypto' does disservice to its subjects

SF Chronicle ^ | December 11, 2006 | Zachary X. Hruby

[veronica]

"Apocalypto," Mel Gibson's new thriller about the ancient Maya civilization, is exactly that: thrilling. But this entertainment comes at a price.

The Maya at the time of Spanish contact are depicted as idyllic hunters and gatherers, or as genocidal murderers, and neither of these scenarios is accurate. The film represents a step backward in our understanding of the complex cultures that existed in the New World before the Spanish invasion, and it is part of a disturbing trend re-emerging in the film industry, portraying non-Western natives as evil savages.

"King Kong" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" show these natives as uncaring, beastlike and virtually inhuman. "Apocalypto" achieves similar goals, but in a much subtler fashion.

As in "The Passion of the Christ," Gibson utilizes native language to invoke a veneer of credibility for his story, in this case Yucatec Maya, a technique that unfortunately does much to legitimize this rather strange version of Maya history.

[JCEccles]

I've got a fantasy sequel idea for Mel: the Turks meet the Mayans in an orgy of beheadings and flaying-alives.

[NeoCaveman]

I didn't hear anybody complaining about Mel Gibson maligning the Romans.

Nobody gives a d*mn about the Romans....

[danmar]

I thought the Maya were extinct by the time the Spanish arrived and this was about the Aztecs.

Well, you've got the whole think backwards; the Mayan descendants are doing just fine on the Yucatan Peninsula and other places, while the Aztecs have vanished without a trace (there are no Aztecs blood line anywhere to be found, although a whole bunch of Mexican revisionists wants you to believe otherwise!).

Remember that Aztlan Nation crap they want you to believe it existed and a large portion of the USA's South-West States belonged to that fantasy Mexican ShangriLa?.

[AmishDude]

What did the Romans ever do for us?

[atomic conspiracy]

from Wikipedia:

According to Spanish sources, as well as frescoes and sculptures from the city of Tajin, the original form of the Mesoamerican game ulama included sacrifice of the entire losing team.

Mayans also held the belief that cenotes or limestone sinkholes were portals to the underworld and sacrificed human beings to please the water god Chaac. The most notable example of this is the "Sacred Cenote" at Chichen Itza where extensive excavations have recovered the remains of 42 individuals, half of them under twenty years old.

[Howard Jarvis Admirer]

LOL! Kind of like the Alien vs. Predator movie but with Muslims vs. Mayans - No matter who wins, you lose!

[rogator]

Just be glad that the Spanish and not the Mohammadans colonized the New World.

[CzarNicky]

so the people are still around obviously but the Mayan Empire had vanished by the time the Spanish arrived. Thus the professor is still an idiot for not figuring this little fact out.

[fight_truth_decay]

Blood Diamond (or war diamond) was my pick for last weekend. http://stopblooddiamonds.org/default.asp?adv=sbd1

However, the epic "mythic action-adventure" Apocalypto was Number UNO at the box office.

MOVIEWEB Interview: How did you research this film to make it authentic?

Mel Gibson: There's a lot of books around. There's a lot of evidence being unearthed as we worked. They were digging out murals going, "Look at this." We even changed some murals we drew on the walls... to emulate the murals that they just found. They were a whole different color scheme and we changed it. Some of the stuff was so cryptic when you looked at it... you couldn't quite make it out. We had to make things a little bit more readable. One's eyes don't just adjust to that unless you lived in that culture.

So the human sacrifice scenes that was what it was like for that time period?

Mel Gibson: I would think so. There's a lot of hypothetical dialogue in terms of what's addressed, but I'm sure that that's what it was about. It was an appeasement of God's wrath. The hearts and bloodletting... that's what it was about. So we just put words to it. I don't know whether they used those words but they probably used something like them. It used to take them less then a minute to get a guy's heart out. That's if you didn't go through the ribcage. It was just awful what they did to one another. Chewing their fingers off, cutting their eyelids off, and their lips. They were doing target practice on real targets.

Farhad Safinia (co-writer) : I think it was about humiliation.

Mel Gibson: It was so much about humiliation. That's the really crazy thing about the culture. You have this fantastic civilization on one hand, and there's such acts of barbarism in there. They knew about the stars, and the constellations, and about all kinds of things; buildings. They a library with books and a language. They were like the Greeks, you know?

What is the key for you in humanizing these people?

Mel Gibson: It's all to do with the human story. It's the universal, mythic kind of tale but knocked down to a level, hopefully, we can all understand. When I was 15 years old, you're not complete at all, in fact I'm not complete, yet! I just remember some older guy, really putting the jab into the middle of me by calling me the most insulting thing I could think of, what he did was to call me "Almost." "Hey, Almost." Like that, and I was just so offended by that. That's where that came from in the film. It means Almost. He really is Almost and then he becomes. Those human experiences we have get put into it.

The film's about fear. We've explored every primal fear we could fit into two hours and five minutes.

Can you talk about the waterfall sequence?

Mel Gibson: Well, it's a real waterfall. We used a SpiderCam. We put the Genesis on it. I think that's the first time that's happened. We had to span the waterfall and river with cranes and put the cables up. It was quite an elaborate setup to enable the camera to go over the guys shoulder, down on the water, over the edge, turn around and then pull back in one shot. Of course you're not going to make a real guy jump off something like that. He'll kill himself.

A cow fell over one day. A cow was trying to swim across... it was just overtaken by the depth of water and it fell over the waterfall! It hit the water and I thought, "It's toast." It was about 170 feet, this waterfall. It came up somewhere on the other side and it was all busted up... then the waves got it, it was upside down, bouncing off the rocks... and it got into this deep water. One of the local guys, this is the weird thing of all... the cow's in the water, but this Mexican guy just goes up to it and it's like he said something to it, it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen, and the cow just walked up and started eating grass!

Farhad Safinia: The cow was just munching grass. It felt like it didn't remember a thing.

http://www.movieweb.com/news/23/15923.php

[A. Pole]

there are no Aztecs blood line anywhere to be found, although a whole bunch of Mexican revisionists wants you to believe otherwise!).

Well, how do you explain the fact that there are still more than 1.5 million people in central Mexico speaking Aztec (Nahuatl) language?

Mexico City - the oldest and largest city in America (established in 1325 as Tenochtitlan) never lost its demographic continuity. Well into last century there were neighborhoods which did not use Spanish language.

[Finny]

"King Kong" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" show these natives as uncaring, beastlike and virtually inhuman."

The natives in these two movies are fictional people in fictional places, and shouldn't be taken seriously as anything but plot devices.

You're right. I made the same observation as the critic when I saw King Kong -- and I was glad to see it because what's also true is that people aren't born with a universal human understanding of compassion. It's taught. Wicked, cannabalistic, brutal, sadistic tribes did and do exist. What American Indians did on a battlefield would make Charles Manson proud. Somewhere down in each one of us' guts, we must comprehend and learn to fear the fact that such soullessness as human sacrifice, barbarism, and slavery are the natural state of man without God. Sooner or later, it's going to have to be recognized that Christianity plays a unique role in better futures.

Again, this is the reason it's going to be a long war.

[Finny]

I guess what I'm really saying is that it's a good thing that we're all reminded of this every once in awhile in movies like King Kong.

[webheart]

I saw it. I liked it. There were a couple of really glaring inconsistencies (solar eclipse in the daytime, yet full moon that night (LOL!!) and the captives cross the river one way, yet the escapee crosses the river in the same direction on the way back), but it was brilliantly executed. It had good action, and I'm sure some historical narrative to it. It may well have been about the Aztecs, since it was the Aztecs who Cortez encountered, although the Maya were the inhabitants of the jungles of Guatemala and the Yucatan peninsula. But that doesn't matter, it was the best movie of the weekend in my opinion. Thanks, Mr. Gibson, I hope you enjoy my $9.00.

[danmar]

Well, how do you explain the fact that there are still more than 1.5 million people in central Mexico speaking Aztec (Nahuatl) language?

Well, I am not an linguist per se; if I were to turn the tables around and ask you why some tribes in Northern Africa are speaking German...what would be your answer!?

Furthermore where are you getting your stats from?

[FFIGHTER]

Imagine that, a movie that is not based on fact. What will they think of next?

[A. Pole]

Furthermore where are you getting your stats from?

They are all over. Start with looking for Nahuatl language on Wikipedia.

Mexico is filled with Indian tribes, Aztec related tribes are still there. 1.5 million still speak Aztec/Nahuatl but many more of the same stock speak Spanish.

Mexicans have more Indian blood then European. The upper class is mostly white.

[dsc]

"portraying non-Western natives as evil savages."

I'm wracking my brains to think of some reason to imagine that the pre-Columbian Indians weren't evil savages. (Strain, strain...) Nope, can't do it.

"Second, Mayan city people are shown as violent extremists"

I find that use of the word "extremists" to be very surprising. Apparently it has become a generic pejorative among the eneuretic left, completely divorced from its original meaning.

"bent on harvesting innocent villagers to provide flesh for sacrifice and women for slaves"

IOW, business as usual among the stone-age primitives that occupied these continents before Christians arrived.

"Problem is, there exists no archaeological, historic or ethnohistoric data to suggest that any such mass sacrifices -- numbering in the thousands, or even hundreds -- took place in the Maya world. "

I don't believe you, Prof, because I well know that if there were, you'd lie about it.

"the new beginning for these lost Mayan people, the Apocalypto, evidently is the coming of the Spaniards and Christianity to the Americas."

God has a history of taking lands away from people who practice human sacrifice...or, perhaps, abortion in the tens of millions?

"The Maya were simple jungle bands or bloodthirsty masses duped by false religions, resulting in the ruin of their mighty but misguided civilization, and their salvation arrived with the coming of Christian beliefs saddled on the backs of Spanish conquistadors."

Truth stings, don't it, ya ivory-tower twerp?

"As archaeologists struggle to accurately reconstruct ancient Maya society"

Road apples. All the honesty in all the archaeologists in America, distilled and crystallized, wouldn't even be visible to the naked eye.

"Further, inaccurate representations by Hollywood of indigenous peoples as amoral, inhuman or uncivilized"

Nothing inaccurate about it, as you "archaeologists" really should know.

[the invisib1e hand]

Christian tenets that go back what, 1,000 years?

More like 2,000. Recall that a woman was to be stoned to death in Israel for adultery and was brought before Jesus to test him.

For some reason, Israel stopped stoning women for adultery at some point thereafter.

Christians think they weren't paying attention...

[Ciexyz]

This is a great pro-family film. The characters are very appealing and engaging (well, the good guys and heroes. But even the villains are portrayed as having feelings for their children and comrades and honoring their own twisted version of "honor".)

The film is violent, but it's all justified by the plot, and in some scenes, Mel pulls his punches. Can't say anymore because I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but this is not just Rambo in the jungle.

I was also impressed by the writing. The action gets more and more suspenseful as the plot unfolds, and you think, this is it for the main characters...can't say more, it'll spoil you.

[GVnana]

a step backward in our understanding of the complex cultures that existed in the New World before the Spanish invasion, and it is part of a disturbing trend re-emerging in the film industry, portraying non-Western natives as evil savages

Worthy of a politically correct barf alert.

It's high time someone made a movie about these ancient cultures, and I'll bet Gibson comes closer to a sympathetic understanding of them than this critic ever will.