"Apocalypto"

Mel Gibson's latest pretends to care about the fall of man, but it really only wants to impale, flay, disfigure and torture him. Sound familiar?

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Mel Gibson, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

Dec. 8, 2006 | To be truly effective, "Apocalypto" needs an exclamation mark. You just can't give a movie a title that silly without one, and also without some portentous '60s-style typeface that looks like it was carved out of limestone, or came pouring out of a volcano. If only this were a cheeseball entertainment out of 1963, where the opening-night audience might be showered with Styrofoam temple blocks and soap-bubble lava, while actors in fearsome Maya regalia bearing plastic severed heads on spears roamed the aisles.

Sadly, Mel Gibson's latest directorial offering is not "APOCALYPTO!" but just "Apocalypto," and despite the silly title it's a relentlessly gruesome, visually impressive and ultimately not very interesting movie with some pretensions to seriousness. Depending on how you look at it, these pretensions are either too much or not enough. As I see it, "Apocalypto" is too bloody-minded to work as pure escapist adventure, but far too limited in intellectual or imaginative scope to be challenging. Unless, that is, your idea of being challenged is to see the many different ways the human body can be impaled and disfigured: with stakes, spears, arrows, knives, pikes, teeth, darts and elaborate spiky wooden contraptions whose names I don't know.

Let's face it: Hardly anyone will go see "Apocalypto" out of genuine interest in the pre-Columbian Maya civilization that is so problematically captured here. People are curious about this movie because of what might be called extra-textual reasons, because its director is an erratic and charismatic Hollywood figure who would have totally marginalized himself by now if he didn't possess a crude gift for crafting violent pop entertainment. No one but Gibson, arguably, would have tried to make an expensive studio-scale film on remote Mexican locations, shot in the Yucatec language with a cast of unknowns. (He seems to be making an esoteric tour of world languages. Will his next movie be in Hawaiian? Romansh? Tocharian B?)

This kind of obsessive, Erich von Stroheim-style folly, this passion for bigness and spectacle and the outsize egotism it embodies, holds tremendous appeal within the culture of Hollywood. So the public narrative surrounding "Apocalypto" is almost all about Gibson, and hardly at all about the movie. Can the demented Captain Ahab accomplishment of this film outweigh, in the hearts and minds of movie-biz insiders, Gibson's drunken anti-Semitic tirade or his general reputation as a religious fanatic and all-around nutjob?

Well, having seen "Apocalypto" I have two things to tell you: Mel Gibson has serious issues with violence and masculinity, and if there's really "Oscar buzz" around this picture, then everyone in Hollywood really is an idiot. There are about 10 truly amazing minutes in "Apocalypto," when the film's hero, a captured villager named Jaguar Paw (played by the Native American actor Rudy Youngblood), is brought into a Maya city as a prisoner and taken to the central pyramid, where captives are being sacrificed by the score to appease Kukulcán, supreme god of the Maya pantheon (equivalent to the Toltec-Aztec god Quetzalcoatl). And that's about it.

I have no doubt that the costumes and the monumental architecture of these scenes were exhaustively researched, and the mood of ruinous, smoky, blood-curdling terror is fully convincing. Yucatecan Maya culture was indeed in decline by the 16th century (which is clearly the period of "Apocalypto"), and while the scenes of environmental degradation and crop failure have undertones of contemporary commentary, they're not outside the bounds of plausibility. But this fragmentary and terrifying glimpse is literally all we see of Maya civilization in "Apocalypto." The rest of the film -- like almost all of Gibson's films, either as director or star -- is the story of a lonely masculine hero who sacrifices and suffers, and who is redeemed through bloodshed.

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