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Movie Review: Apocalypto by director Mel Gibson
BY MAGGIE SCOTT
Mel Gibson’s new film “Apocalypto” reaches new heights even for this director for abysmal violence that does a disservice to what in kind consideration of his creative intent must have started out as a desire to explore a lost culture and the meaning that loss has for other civilizations.
The Mayan culture left behind wonders of astronomical discoveries and architectural wonder. Its artwork is still being discovered in the dense jungles of Central America and its pyramids draw millions to explore and to be amazed. Its demise is still wrapped in mystery.
Gibson’s film illustrates a simplistic theory: The Mayan destroyed themselves with their blood-thirsty human sacrifice to pagan gods and with their savage conquests of peace-loving people living in harmony with the land. Both of these are copiously and vividly depicted for over two hours in a story that borrows from such tales of kidnap/rescue as “The Last of the Mohicans.”
The hero of Gibson’s story is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young forest tribe dweller whose people strive to reject fear, value family, cultivate pride and to remember the gifts of the forest’s animals.
But, one morning, the tribe is overrun by Mayan seeking slaves to work their quarries and to sacrifice to a god who needs appeasing if their crops are ever to yield life-sustaining food again.
Burning the forest tribe’s village and killing, raping, burning and binding their captives, the marauders appear to relish their mission; and never hesitate to take advantage of weakness and despair through the long forced march back.
There, the women are auctioned off and the men are coated in glaring blue paint and marched up the long steps of the sacrificial pyramid, down which headless, heartless bodies plunge. An eclipse spares Jaguar Paw’s life, only to be faced with a heartless game of target practice.
Motivating the young warrior’s will to live and to prevail against these sadistic bloodhounds is a pregnant wife and child trapped at the bottom of a ravine, where Jaguar Paw lowered them during the attack on the village.
If Gibson means this to be a cautionary tale for our times, the message is lost in his fixation with how creative man has been over the years with ways to kill his fellow human beings. This could have been an amazing movie if Gibson had lavished more attention on life than on death. Rated R.
