'Apocalypto'
Hmmm. Let me see. Was it the jolly male bonding sequence that opens the film, where a gathering of Mayan hunters cajoles the group patsy into ingesting a mouthful of fresh-killed tapir testicles? Could it have been the heart disembowelments at the big sacrificial slaughter? Maybe it was the multiple decapitations, the spear through the mouth, the cracked skulls, the slit throats, the slit wrists, the spiked animal trap that turns one false step into one truly aerated lump of human Swiss cheese?
Had I sat through "Apocalypto" without knowing who was the creative force behind all of this, um, mayhem, I might have tossed it off to the dyspeptic inventions of one demented puppy. Since we all know that the film was produced, directed and co-written by yesteryear's road warrior, I am obliged to revise my age guesstimate.
Having, in earlier movies, indulged a prurient fascination with really bad deaths through meticulously researched re-creations of medieval Scottish battles and Christ's crucifixion, Mel Gibson turns his blood-streaked historical eye to the decline of the ancient Maya. Subjugating any assessment of the Mayans' enduring contributions as a culture to his own dark anatomical fantasies, he offers up a proud, unremitting carnival of sadism and human suffering.
The brave heart at the center of Gibson and Farhad Safinia's scenario is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood, a camera-friendly Texan of Comanche and Cree descent). He is a nubile jungle resident, whose hunter-gatherer resources are pressed to the max when his community is pillaged by the savage military wing of the ruling elite.
Jaguar is yoked by the neck and carted off on a grueling death march with his fellow villagers, but not before depositing his son and pregnant wife in a deep pit, safe from harm's way. Once the doomed captives reach the roiling urban center, they are divvied up according to sex to be sold into slavery or offered up to the gods, who have been venting their wrath as of late via agricultural plagues.
The sacrificial production number that is "Apocalypto's" centerpiece is an orgy of rolling heads and bulgy-eyed, devil-possessed savages that makes the corresponding native rave in Peter Jackson's "King Kong" look like a black-tie UNICEF fundraiser by comparison. The director antes up the grotesquerie with shuddering glimpses of a laughing dwarf or a smirking, fleshy royal scion (size does matter in a Gibson flick), then nails home the horror with point-of-view shots that put you in the quaking shoes of a terrified sacrificial victim as the knife descends.
Ah, but there is contemporary import to all of this, you say, pointing to the wicked morass in Iraq or Sudan. Ah, but Gibson is such a craftsman, you say, crediting the artful makeup and production design.
Any claims of cinematic prowess or social-political consequence, however, are obliterated by the pornographic relish Gibson seems to take in wowing us with his inventory of tortures and outrages.
There is comic relief to be had, intended or otherwise. When a giant tree falls, ker-plomp, in front of the warrior Mayans, the incensed chief protests, Ratso Rizzo-style, "I am walking here!" We also loved the climactic tropical rain shower that fills up the pit containing Mrs. Jaguar Paw and son in laughably record time.
It should come as no surprise that, when forced to choose between their arduous primitive existence and the uncertainties of Western civilization, she and her husband head for the jungles. If civilization is moving toward movies like "Apocalypto," you really can't blame them.
Advertisement
Movie Showtimes
Most Talked About Posts
Random Reads Recommended
