Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Mel Gibson
Year: 2006
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Apocalypto is the final chapter in Mel Gibson’s Heroic Bloodshed trilogy, which includes Braveheart and Passion of the Christ. Mel Gibson’s embarrassing anti-Semitic slurs during his drunk driving arrest dampened public enthusiasm for his then forthcoming followup to his Heartland slam dunk Passion of The Christ, which is a shame. Apocalypto, for all its Mayan trappings and dire warnings of the collapse of great civilizations from moral rot within, is essentially a chase movie, which is about as pure as cinema gets.
This being a Mel Gibson movie, there are also severed heads tumbling down steps, panthers chewing on faces, and mists of blood spraying from head wounds received from blunt objects. Personally, I enjoy that kind of thing, as long as Gibson sticks to fiction and doesn’t insist on reinventing the Gospel.
I’ve got to admit — Gibson has a genuine talent for red meat imagery. His compositions are classically beautiful and he shows an enviable control of the filmmaking medium. You’ve got to love how Gibson films the sequence where a warrior and a panther are chasing down Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), neither one aware of the other.
Gibson doesn’t do quite as well when it comes to his characters. Initially, Gibson planned to film Apocalypto in the Mayan language without subtitles. That might have actually worked because of the way Gibson has directed his actors. His heroes might as well have halos over their heads, and his villains are Evil with a capital E. They hardly need dialog.
Restraint is not a word you ordinarily associate with Gibson’s directing style, but I might have enjoyed Apocalypto more if his characterizations approximated recognizable human behavior a little more closely, the way the characters in Braveheart did. True, the characters in Braveheart were larger than life, but the ones in Apocalypto, particularly the villains, approach the simplicity of the old serials where Snidely Whiplash tied down the damsel on the railroad tracks.
That said, Apocalypto is a rousing adventure tale, with visceral battle scenes, suspenseful chases that pump up the blood, and lots of satisfying carnage.
Try to ignore the subtext of moral decay if you can. It’s especially galling when the arriving Europeans are recast as harbingers of civilization at the end of the Apocalypto, when the historical record shows that they are the real bloodthirsty savages.
That Mel Gibson — what a kidder.
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