Like it or not, it's hard to separate the man from his movies. I'm referring to Mel Gibson and his propensity for blood and violence. We tended to overlook and forgive the tumultuous content of his first acting experiences, things like the "Mad Max" and "Lethal Weapon" series, accepting the blood and violence as part and parcel of the works at hand. But after those came the directorial efforts, "Braveheart" (1995), "The Passion of the Christ" (2004), and now "Apocalypto" (2006). They are films blood-soaked in violence. Then, it's hard not to look past the man's personal life, the temper tantrum and eruption of racial epithets we all read about and the incident at an "Apocalypto" screening.
Why do I mention this kind of thing up front, something I have never done until now? Because you may feel as you read on that I am being unduly hard on "Apocalypto" as a film, and I want you to know that, yes, I am being hard on the film thanks in some measure to Gibson's track record. Biased reviewing? In this case, you bet. But who isn't biased to some degree on any subject? Reviewers try to remain neutral going into a film, and I even went into "Apoctalypto" wanting to like it because friends had told me good things about it. Yet it still worried me that it would be another bloodbath, a fair assessment in my judgment based on past experience. And, indeed, I found the film bathed in blood and gore. The question is, Should it be? Would any other director have handled the material differently or rejected it entirely? We accepted John Ford for his forthright Westerns and Hitchcock for his masterful suspense thrillers. Those were noble ambitions. Should we accept Gibson for blood and violence simply because he is so good at depicting it? That does not seem noble to me, especially as "Apocalypto" could have done so much more, dealing as it does with one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. Worse, I simply found it a dull and redundant film.
The setting for "Apocalypto" is the Yucatán Peninsula at the end of the heyday of the Mayan culture, somewhere near the end of the fifteenth century, A.D. (as evidenced by the film's ending). One can trace Mayan society back to well before the time of Christ, making them one of the longest-lived civilizations in history. For perhaps two thousand years or more, the Maya advanced some of the finest art, architecture, science, agriculture, writing, history, and technology on Earth. In Gibson's "Apocalypto," though, the co-writer and director shows us only one aspect of their culture: their extensive participation in blood sacrifice during the collapse of their world. Seems unfair, but it sells movie tickets.
There is a good deal of motion in this "motion" picture, some of it justified, most of it there for its own sake, to heighten the action unnecessarily. The plot opens with the hunt of a tapir by a group of Mayans, a sequence frantically paced and done mostly in quick close-ups, ending with the bloody death of the animal and its disembowelling. (Note: Gibson tells us that no tapirs were harmed in the production of this movie; they are an endangered species.) The hunt is clearly a portent of things to come in terms of the film's gory content and frenetic style.
At a recent press conference and screening of the film, a group of present-day Mayans protested the movie as being unrepresentative of their people, portrayed here only as savage, backward villagers. The powers that be ejected the protesters, apparently with Gibson's blessings. One wonders if the protesters didn't have a point.
At the end of the Mayan reign, the people abandoned their great cities and did, indeed, return to rural life. The filmmakers tried to be historically accurate in this regard, but according to everything I've read about the fall of the Maya, the film's setting is about three hundred or more years too late, because in the film many of the Maya are still living in the cities, while our hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), and his family are living in a tiny village. Close enough, I suppose, if you want to reduce the entire end of a civilization to a single adventure story.
An enemy raid by the city folk on Jaguar Paw's village is probably the bloodiest and most brutal sequence in the picture. The city people are there to take captives, of whom the women they will sell into slavery and the men they will either put to work building their temples or sacrifice to the gods by cutting out their hearts. Yes, we eventually get to see this bloodletting in all its glory. How do you think you get people into a theater?
Jaguar Paw's expectant wife and young child escape and hide out, while Jaguar Paw vows to return to them and start life anew. We know this is going to happen because a spooky little girl foretells it. Thus, Jaguar Paw's flight and return home is symbolic of the Mayan civilization's transition from one grand way of life to another, simpler one. But is the symbolism necessary when the film is really about gory action and incessant bloodshed?
After a short stint in the Mayan city (wonderful sets, by the way), Jaguar Paw makes his getaway into the jungle, pursued by half a dozen or more of his enemies. This second half of the movie is essentially one long chase sequence, almost an hour in length. Here, the story line most resembles the 1966 film "The Naked Prey" with Cornell Wilde and the 1924 Richard Connell short story "The Most Dangerous Game," with a little of "The Fugitive" and "Lord of the Flies" thrown in for good measure. The chase goes on and on, containing practically every preposterous Hollywood cliché one can think of along the way. I mean, by the time it's over, the hero has been pierced by arrows, gone over a waterfall, fallen from a tree, and run halfway across Mexico, never for moment showing any sign of tiring. Only in the movies.
Yet at the same time that Gibson is using exaggeration, he wants us to take all of this stuff perfectly seriously by his making his movie as historically authentic as possible, right down to using the same language gimmick he exploited in "The Passion of the Christ," that is, by having his actors speak in the native tongue of the characters they're portraying and letting the audience read subtitles. I'm still not convinced, however, that scholars know for sure how people spoke (pronounced) ancient languages in former days, so the "authenticity" is always in question. Fortunately, in "Apocalypto" there isn't much dialogue, so the subtitles are few, but I still found them a distraction.
And speaking of authenticity, no one knows exactly why the Maya forsook their cities and went back to a simple, rural way of life. The movie conjectures it was because of drought and over tilling the soil, leading the rulers to seek refuge in their gods and the excessive blood sacrifices we see in the movie. To reinforce the idea, Gibson prefaces the movie with the words of historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." That part I can accept. Sensationalizing it I cannot.
"Apolcalypto" features torture, strangulation, knifing, spearing, throat slitting, head crushing, decapitation, you name it. While at the same time its locations (shot in the Mexican jungles) are gorgeous, its photography breathtaking, its costumes and sets handsome and realistic. Take your pick. I also liked one cute line: When a tree almost falls on a Mayan leader, he says, annoyed, "I am walking here!" How could it not remind one of Dustin Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy"?
Finally, the climax of the movie involves such a monumental coincidence that we must interpret it symbolically; otherwise, it's laughable. The question is what it means, but I won't reveal its literal underpinnings. I've probably given away too much of the film as it is. Not that there is all that much to give away besides kill, chase, and maim.
Why do I mention this kind of thing up front, something I have never done until now? Because you may feel as you read on that I am being unduly hard on "Apocalypto" as a film, and I want you to know that, yes, I am being hard on the film thanks in some measure to Gibson's track record. Biased reviewing? In this case, you bet. But who isn't biased to some degree on any subject? Reviewers try to remain neutral going into a film, and I even went into "Apoctalypto" wanting to like it because friends had told me good things about it. Yet it still worried me that it would be another bloodbath, a fair assessment in my judgment based on past experience. And, indeed, I found the film bathed in blood and gore. The question is, Should it be? Would any other director have handled the material differently or rejected it entirely? We accepted John Ford for his forthright Westerns and Hitchcock for his masterful suspense thrillers. Those were noble ambitions. Should we accept Gibson for blood and violence simply because he is so good at depicting it? That does not seem noble to me, especially as "Apocalypto" could have done so much more, dealing as it does with one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. Worse, I simply found it a dull and redundant film.
The setting for "Apocalypto" is the Yucatán Peninsula at the end of the heyday of the Mayan culture, somewhere near the end of the fifteenth century, A.D. (as evidenced by the film's ending). One can trace Mayan society back to well before the time of Christ, making them one of the longest-lived civilizations in history. For perhaps two thousand years or more, the Maya advanced some of the finest art, architecture, science, agriculture, writing, history, and technology on Earth. In Gibson's "Apocalypto," though, the co-writer and director shows us only one aspect of their culture: their extensive participation in blood sacrifice during the collapse of their world. Seems unfair, but it sells movie tickets.
There is a good deal of motion in this "motion" picture, some of it justified, most of it there for its own sake, to heighten the action unnecessarily. The plot opens with the hunt of a tapir by a group of Mayans, a sequence frantically paced and done mostly in quick close-ups, ending with the bloody death of the animal and its disembowelling. (Note: Gibson tells us that no tapirs were harmed in the production of this movie; they are an endangered species.) The hunt is clearly a portent of things to come in terms of the film's gory content and frenetic style.
At a recent press conference and screening of the film, a group of present-day Mayans protested the movie as being unrepresentative of their people, portrayed here only as savage, backward villagers. The powers that be ejected the protesters, apparently with Gibson's blessings. One wonders if the protesters didn't have a point.
At the end of the Mayan reign, the people abandoned their great cities and did, indeed, return to rural life. The filmmakers tried to be historically accurate in this regard, but according to everything I've read about the fall of the Maya, the film's setting is about three hundred or more years too late, because in the film many of the Maya are still living in the cities, while our hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), and his family are living in a tiny village. Close enough, I suppose, if you want to reduce the entire end of a civilization to a single adventure story.
An enemy raid by the city folk on Jaguar Paw's village is probably the bloodiest and most brutal sequence in the picture. The city people are there to take captives, of whom the women they will sell into slavery and the men they will either put to work building their temples or sacrifice to the gods by cutting out their hearts. Yes, we eventually get to see this bloodletting in all its glory. How do you think you get people into a theater?
Jaguar Paw's expectant wife and young child escape and hide out, while Jaguar Paw vows to return to them and start life anew. We know this is going to happen because a spooky little girl foretells it. Thus, Jaguar Paw's flight and return home is symbolic of the Mayan civilization's transition from one grand way of life to another, simpler one. But is the symbolism necessary when the film is really about gory action and incessant bloodshed?
After a short stint in the Mayan city (wonderful sets, by the way), Jaguar Paw makes his getaway into the jungle, pursued by half a dozen or more of his enemies. This second half of the movie is essentially one long chase sequence, almost an hour in length. Here, the story line most resembles the 1966 film "The Naked Prey" with Cornell Wilde and the 1924 Richard Connell short story "The Most Dangerous Game," with a little of "The Fugitive" and "Lord of the Flies" thrown in for good measure. The chase goes on and on, containing practically every preposterous Hollywood cliché one can think of along the way. I mean, by the time it's over, the hero has been pierced by arrows, gone over a waterfall, fallen from a tree, and run halfway across Mexico, never for moment showing any sign of tiring. Only in the movies.
Yet at the same time that Gibson is using exaggeration, he wants us to take all of this stuff perfectly seriously by his making his movie as historically authentic as possible, right down to using the same language gimmick he exploited in "The Passion of the Christ," that is, by having his actors speak in the native tongue of the characters they're portraying and letting the audience read subtitles. I'm still not convinced, however, that scholars know for sure how people spoke (pronounced) ancient languages in former days, so the "authenticity" is always in question. Fortunately, in "Apocalypto" there isn't much dialogue, so the subtitles are few, but I still found them a distraction.
And speaking of authenticity, no one knows exactly why the Maya forsook their cities and went back to a simple, rural way of life. The movie conjectures it was because of drought and over tilling the soil, leading the rulers to seek refuge in their gods and the excessive blood sacrifices we see in the movie. To reinforce the idea, Gibson prefaces the movie with the words of historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." That part I can accept. Sensationalizing it I cannot.
"Apolcalypto" features torture, strangulation, knifing, spearing, throat slitting, head crushing, decapitation, you name it. While at the same time its locations (shot in the Mexican jungles) are gorgeous, its photography breathtaking, its costumes and sets handsome and realistic. Take your pick. I also liked one cute line: When a tree almost falls on a Mayan leader, he says, annoyed, "I am walking here!" How could it not remind one of Dustin Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy"?
Finally, the climax of the movie involves such a monumental coincidence that we must interpret it symbolically; otherwise, it's laughable. The question is what it means, but I won't reveal its literal underpinnings. I've probably given away too much of the film as it is. Not that there is all that much to give away besides kill, chase, and maim.
Like it or not, it's hard to separate the man from his movies. I'm referring to Mel Gibson and his propensity for blood and violence. We tended to overlook and forgive the tumultuous content of his first acting experiences, things like the "Mad Max" and "Lethal Weapon" series, accepting the blood and violence as part and parcel of the works at hand. But after those came the directorial efforts, "Braveheart" (1995), "The Passion of the Christ" (2004), and now "Apocalypto" (2006). They are films blood-soaked in violence. Then, it's hard not to look past the man's personal life, the temper tantrum and eruption of racial epithets we all read about and the incident at an "Apocalypto" screening.
Why do I mention this kind of thing up front, something I have never done until now? Because you may feel as you read on that I am being unduly hard on "Apocalypto" as a film, and I want you to know that, yes, I am being hard on the film thanks in some measure to Gibson's track record. Biased reviewing? In this case, you bet. But who isn't biased to some degree on any subject? Reviewers try to remain neutral going into a film, and I even went into "Apoctalypto" wanting to like it because friends had told me good things about it. Yet it still worried me that it would be another bloodbath, a fair assessment in my judgment based on past experience. And, indeed, I found the film bathed in blood and gore. The question is, Should it be? Would any other director have handled the material differently or rejected it entirely? We accepted John Ford for his forthright Westerns and Hitchcock for his masterful suspense thrillers. Those were noble ambitions. Should we accept Gibson for blood and violence simply because he is so good at depicting it? That does not seem noble to me, especially as "Apocalypto" could have done so much more, dealing as it does with one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. Worse, I simply found it a dull and redundant film.
The setting for "Apocalypto" is the Yucatán Peninsula at the end of the heyday of the Mayan culture, somewhere near the end of the fifteenth century, A.D. (as evidenced by the film's ending). One can trace Mayan society back to well before the time of Christ, making them one of the longest-lived civilizations in history. For perhaps two thousand years or more, the Maya advanced some of the finest art, architecture, science, agriculture, writing, history, and technology on Earth. In Gibson's "Apocalypto," though, the co-writer and director shows us only one aspect of their culture: their extensive participation in blood sacrifice during the collapse of their world. Seems unfair, but it sells movie tickets.
There is a good deal of motion in this "motion" picture, some of it justified, most of it there for its own sake, to heighten the action unnecessarily. The plot opens with the hunt of a tapir by a group of Mayans, a sequence frantically paced and done mostly in quick close-ups, ending with the bloody death of the animal and its disembowelling. (Note: Gibson tells us that no tapirs were harmed in the production of this movie; they are an endangered species.) The hunt is clearly a portent of things to come in terms of the film's gory content and frenetic style.
At a recent press conference and screening of the film, a group of present-day Mayans protested the movie as being unrepresentative of their people, portrayed here only as savage, backward villagers. The powers that be ejected the protesters, apparently with Gibson's blessings. One wonders if the protesters didn't have a point.
At the end of the Mayan reign, the people abandoned their great cities and did, indeed, return to rural life. The filmmakers tried to be historically accurate in this regard, but according to everything I've read about the fall of the Maya, the film's setting is about three hundred or more years too late, because in the film many of the Maya are still living in the cities, while our hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), and his family are living in a tiny village. Close enough, I suppose, if you want to reduce the entire end of a civilization to a single adventure story.
An enemy raid by the city folk on Jaguar Paw's village is probably the bloodiest and most brutal sequence in the picture. The city people are there to take captives, of whom the women they will sell into slavery and the men they will either put to work building their temples or sacrifice to the gods by cutting out their hearts. Yes, we eventually get to see this bloodletting in all its glory. How do you think you get people into a theater?
Jaguar Paw's expectant wife and young child escape and hide out, while Jaguar Paw vows to return to them and start life anew. We know this is going to happen because a spooky little girl foretells it. Thus, Jaguar Paw's flight and return home is symbolic of the Mayan civilization's transition from one grand way of life to another, simpler one. But is the symbolism necessary when the film is really about gory action and incessant bloodshed?
After a short stint in the Mayan city (wonderful sets, by the way), Jaguar Paw makes his getaway into the jungle, pursued by half a dozen or more of his enemies. This second half of the movie is essentially one long chase sequence, almost an hour in length. Here, the story line most resembles the 1966 film "The Naked Prey" with Cornell Wilde and the 1924 Richard Connell short story "The Most Dangerous Game," with a little of "The Fugitive" and "Lord of the Flies" thrown in for good measure. The chase goes on and on, containing practically every preposterous Hollywood cliché one can think of along the way. I mean, by the time it's over, the hero has been pierced by arrows, gone over a waterfall, fallen from a tree, and run halfway across Mexico, never for moment showing any sign of tiring. Only in the movies.
Yet at the same time that Gibson is using exaggeration, he wants us to take all of this stuff perfectly seriously by his making his movie as historically authentic as possible, right down to using the same language gimmick he exploited in "The Passion of the Christ," that is, by having his actors speak in the native tongue of the characters they're portraying and letting the audience read subtitles. I'm still not convinced, however, that scholars know for sure how people spoke (pronounced) ancient languages in former days, so the "authenticity" is always in question. Fortunately, in "Apocalypto" there isn't much dialogue, so the subtitles are few, but I still found them a distraction.
And speaking of authenticity, no one knows exactly why the Maya forsook their cities and went back to a simple, rural way of life. The movie conjectures it was because of drought and over tilling the soil, leading the rulers to seek refuge in their gods and the excessive blood sacrifices we see in the movie. To reinforce the idea, Gibson prefaces the movie with the words of historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." That part I can accept. Sensationalizing it I cannot.
"Apolcalypto" features torture, strangulation, knifing, spearing, throat slitting, head crushing, decapitation, you name it. While at the same time its locations (shot in the Mexican jungles) are gorgeous, its photography breathtaking, its costumes and sets handsome and realistic. Take your pick. I also liked one cute line: When a tree almost falls on a Mayan leader, he says, annoyed, "I am walking here!" How could it not remind one of Dustin Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy"?
Finally, the climax of the movie involves such a monumental coincidence that we must interpret it symbolically; otherwise, it's laughable. The question is what it means, but I won't reveal its literal underpinnings. I've probably given away too much of the film as it is. Not that there is all that much to give away besides kill, chase, and maim.
Why do I mention this kind of thing up front, something I have never done until now? Because you may feel as you read on that I am being unduly hard on "Apocalypto" as a film, and I want you to know that, yes, I am being hard on the film thanks in some measure to Gibson's track record. Biased reviewing? In this case, you bet. But who isn't biased to some degree on any subject? Reviewers try to remain neutral going into a film, and I even went into "Apoctalypto" wanting to like it because friends had told me good things about it. Yet it still worried me that it would be another bloodbath, a fair assessment in my judgment based on past experience. And, indeed, I found the film bathed in blood and gore. The question is, Should it be? Would any other director have handled the material differently or rejected it entirely? We accepted John Ford for his forthright Westerns and Hitchcock for his masterful suspense thrillers. Those were noble ambitions. Should we accept Gibson for blood and violence simply because he is so good at depicting it? That does not seem noble to me, especially as "Apocalypto" could have done so much more, dealing as it does with one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever known. Worse, I simply found it a dull and redundant film.
The setting for "Apocalypto" is the Yucatán Peninsula at the end of the heyday of the Mayan culture, somewhere near the end of the fifteenth century, A.D. (as evidenced by the film's ending). One can trace Mayan society back to well before the time of Christ, making them one of the longest-lived civilizations in history. For perhaps two thousand years or more, the Maya advanced some of the finest art, architecture, science, agriculture, writing, history, and technology on Earth. In Gibson's "Apocalypto," though, the co-writer and director shows us only one aspect of their culture: their extensive participation in blood sacrifice during the collapse of their world. Seems unfair, but it sells movie tickets.
There is a good deal of motion in this "motion" picture, some of it justified, most of it there for its own sake, to heighten the action unnecessarily. The plot opens with the hunt of a tapir by a group of Mayans, a sequence frantically paced and done mostly in quick close-ups, ending with the bloody death of the animal and its disembowelling. (Note: Gibson tells us that no tapirs were harmed in the production of this movie; they are an endangered species.) The hunt is clearly a portent of things to come in terms of the film's gory content and frenetic style.
At a recent press conference and screening of the film, a group of present-day Mayans protested the movie as being unrepresentative of their people, portrayed here only as savage, backward villagers. The powers that be ejected the protesters, apparently with Gibson's blessings. One wonders if the protesters didn't have a point.
At the end of the Mayan reign, the people abandoned their great cities and did, indeed, return to rural life. The filmmakers tried to be historically accurate in this regard, but according to everything I've read about the fall of the Maya, the film's setting is about three hundred or more years too late, because in the film many of the Maya are still living in the cities, while our hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), and his family are living in a tiny village. Close enough, I suppose, if you want to reduce the entire end of a civilization to a single adventure story.
An enemy raid by the city folk on Jaguar Paw's village is probably the bloodiest and most brutal sequence in the picture. The city people are there to take captives, of whom the women they will sell into slavery and the men they will either put to work building their temples or sacrifice to the gods by cutting out their hearts. Yes, we eventually get to see this bloodletting in all its glory. How do you think you get people into a theater?
Jaguar Paw's expectant wife and young child escape and hide out, while Jaguar Paw vows to return to them and start life anew. We know this is going to happen because a spooky little girl foretells it. Thus, Jaguar Paw's flight and return home is symbolic of the Mayan civilization's transition from one grand way of life to another, simpler one. But is the symbolism necessary when the film is really about gory action and incessant bloodshed?
After a short stint in the Mayan city (wonderful sets, by the way), Jaguar Paw makes his getaway into the jungle, pursued by half a dozen or more of his enemies. This second half of the movie is essentially one long chase sequence, almost an hour in length. Here, the story line most resembles the 1966 film "The Naked Prey" with Cornell Wilde and the 1924 Richard Connell short story "The Most Dangerous Game," with a little of "The Fugitive" and "Lord of the Flies" thrown in for good measure. The chase goes on and on, containing practically every preposterous Hollywood cliché one can think of along the way. I mean, by the time it's over, the hero has been pierced by arrows, gone over a waterfall, fallen from a tree, and run halfway across Mexico, never for moment showing any sign of tiring. Only in the movies.
Yet at the same time that Gibson is using exaggeration, he wants us to take all of this stuff perfectly seriously by his making his movie as historically authentic as possible, right down to using the same language gimmick he exploited in "The Passion of the Christ," that is, by having his actors speak in the native tongue of the characters they're portraying and letting the audience read subtitles. I'm still not convinced, however, that scholars know for sure how people spoke (pronounced) ancient languages in former days, so the "authenticity" is always in question. Fortunately, in "Apocalypto" there isn't much dialogue, so the subtitles are few, but I still found them a distraction.
And speaking of authenticity, no one knows exactly why the Maya forsook their cities and went back to a simple, rural way of life. The movie conjectures it was because of drought and over tilling the soil, leading the rulers to seek refuge in their gods and the excessive blood sacrifices we see in the movie. To reinforce the idea, Gibson prefaces the movie with the words of historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." That part I can accept. Sensationalizing it I cannot.
"Apolcalypto" features torture, strangulation, knifing, spearing, throat slitting, head crushing, decapitation, you name it. While at the same time its locations (shot in the Mexican jungles) are gorgeous, its photography breathtaking, its costumes and sets handsome and realistic. Take your pick. I also liked one cute line: When a tree almost falls on a Mayan leader, he says, annoyed, "I am walking here!" How could it not remind one of Dustin Hoffman in "Midnight Cowboy"?
Finally, the climax of the movie involves such a monumental coincidence that we must interpret it symbolically; otherwise, it's laughable. The question is what it means, but I won't reveal its literal underpinnings. I've probably given away too much of the film as it is. Not that there is all that much to give away besides kill, chase, and maim.
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