2006 was not what you might call a good year for Mel Gibson as an anti-Semitic rant following an arrest for drink driving confirmed what many had come to suspect after the Jew-bashing that went on in the Passion of the Christ.
Unsurprisingly, this has lead to many of the more po-faced US critics to seize upon Apocalypto as proof of Gibson having a diseased mind, a tendency towards sadism or some kind of fixation with masochism. In fact, the negative critical reactions are so similar that I get the distinct impression that a lot of people went to see pre-screenings having decided before hand to hate this film because... well... because Mel's a bit of a nutter.
On one level, it is hard to disagree with them that Gibson loves to throw some blood about. In fact, Apocalypto is easily the most blood-drenched film to ever appear outside of the horror genre. Even compared to the wound-porn of Saving Private Ryan or Flags of our Fathers, Apocalypto's violence is more evenly distributed throughout the film, more graphic and more stylishly designed than anything Spielberg has contributed to. However, to see this violence as some proof of a diseased mind at work and to take against the film as a result seems like a loss of wood for trees situation comparable to the time the London Evening Standard's former film critic accused Fight Club of being neo-Nazi. In fact, the violence is mostly justified in the context of the film; it's nicely designed and well shot. To dismiss Apocalypto based on its violence is just as bad as dismissing it because of Gibson's anti-Semitic views. It is completely missing the point because there are plenty of reasons to dismiss this film that have nothing to do with either violence or anti-Semitism. In fact, the violence is easily the best bit of the film.
The film begins as Jaguar's Paw, along with his father and companions, hunts a Tapir through the South American rainforest. Having killed the beast and engaged in some horseplay the group encounter a number of refugees who claim that their lands have been ravaged. However, rather than allowing this to get them down, the hunters return home for an evening of food, practical jokes and unconvincing bonding. When the morning comes, Mayan raiders who storm in, capture the men, rape the women and leave the children to fend for themselves awake the village. In the midst of the battle, Jaguar's Paw hides his family in a pit before getting captured himself. The villagers are then marched across country to a nearby Mayan town where they see the de-forestation, the slavery and the industry that goes into supporting the economy of the stone town. Daubed with blue paint they are then taken to the top of a pyramid where a priest is cutting out people's hearts and then throwing their heads down the stairs. JP is next up on the block when a solar eclipse convinces the priest that their god has been satisfied. The Mayan raiders decide to give the prisoners the chance to run free, as long as they can survive being used for target practice. However, when JP runs, he winds up killing the son of the raiders' chief. Howling their rage and loss, the raiders chase JP through the jungle, allowing him to pick them off in a style very reminiscent of that used in the first Rambo film. After much chasing, killing and a man getting his face eaten by a black panther (that's the animal not the political group), the villagers notice the arrival of the Europeans suggesting that the days of the Mayans and their inhuman practices are now numbered.
The first thing that struck me about Apocalypto is the skill with which Gibson captures the simplicity of the hunter-gatherer existence. Trendy world-music listening types might see this as evidence of an idyllic existence imbued with great spiritual strength. However, all I see is a society where just surviving takes so much time and effort that somebody yelping in pain after getting pepper on his cock is enough to reduce the entire village to gales of laughter so intense that they literally are ROTFLMAO-ing. This lack of thought or guile means that when refugees pass through their hunting grounds, the protagonist is berated for letting this worry him. In fact, despite having a Mayan town less than a day's walk from their door, the villagers react to their arrival in the town as though they had stepped onto another planet.
The problem with this film is that Gibson is clearly reaching for some kind of moral. In the run-up to the film's release, Gibson has drawn similarities between the Mayas' sacrificial violence and the actions of the current US Government. In fact, Gibson begins a film with a quote from the American philosopher Will Durant who states, "A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within". The use of this quote has proved controversial to say the least and many have taken it to mean that Gibson thinks that the arrival of the Europeans had nothing much to do with the fall of the Mayan civilisation and that instead their fall was due to some internal corruption. Nevertheless, it is not obviously clear what Point Gibson is trying to make.
Firstly, we can interpret the use of the quote as making a point about how the US government's policy in Iraq is sign of some decay at the heart of the American empire. The problem is that if we take Apocalypto to be a political allegory then a lot of the symbolism is confused. For example, whom are the Americans sacrificing? The two most obvious suspects would be the Iraqis or the American poor who wind up enlisting and dying in battle. If Gibson means that the Iraqis are being sacrificed for the sake of American security then is it fair to suggest that the Iraqis were completely unaware of the world outside their villages and towns. This charge would seem to better apply to the American poor seeing as famously, "The world is watching America and America is watching TV", but the villagers are not really members of the Mayan society. Clearly, if Apocalypto is intended to be a political allegory then it is an astonishingly clumsy one.
Secondly, we can argue that the quote suggests that the Mayan civilisation fell because of some internal moral failing. Indeed, the Mayans here are a bloodthirsty lot who collect slaves and then either work them to death or sacrifice them to their gods. However, the problem with this interpretation is that it is trite, as it seems to suggest that Gibson is saying that the Mayans deserved to fall because they needlessly killed people and while this might well be true, it is hardly a moral message strong enough to warrant a film built around it. However, looking beyond the obvious examples of moral corruption we can also see a willingness to use nationalistic rhetoric and blood and guts sensationalism to keep the support of the masses in Gibson's depiction of the Mayans. Indeed, one of the theories as to why the Mayans actually fell was that the ruling class loss the support of the lower orders. The problem here is that from Braveheart to The Passion of the Christ, Gibson has shown himself to be highly adept at the dark arts of political theatre. In fact, he is so adept that in the wake of Braveheart, a local council in Scotland commissioned a sculpture of William Wallace that looks surprisingly familiar. Therefore, if Gibson is attempting to attack the Mayans (and by extension the Americans) for their simplistic politics then he is showing a simply stunning lack of self-awareness.
This thematic confusion is not helped by the fact that Gibson really does not actually show the Mayan civilisation collapsing from within as when the Europeans turn up, the ruling class is still very much in control and the population seem happy as their town is expanding. In fact, the only way in which the quote makes sense is if we compare it to the historical record which suggests that actually the Mayan civilisation started to decay centuries before the Europeans turned up and even when the Europeans did arrive, it took them 170 years to completely get the Mayans under control. The fact that the quote makes sense in a historical context is bizarre since it makes little sense in the context of a film so full of historical inaccuracies.
However, if we set aside any points that Gibson might be trying to make with this film along with Apocalypto's broadly simplistic characterisation and non-existent dialogue we find a film with some top-notch action direction.
Gibson opts to film most of the combat with the controversial "shaky-cam" meaning that the combats are hard to follow and continuously intercut between different viewpoints and angles. However, while this style is completely unsuited to the martial arts or stylised action films that so over-used it, it proves to be remarkably effective in capturing the essence of bloody chaos of tribal warfare.
The film also contains a lot of violence against animals. In one ten-minute section, Gibson dispatches a black panther (stab stab stab), a monkey (crunch crunch crunch) and a snake (stomp stomp stomp). People, on the other hand, get their heads cut off, their heads crushed on rocks and their faces ripped off by panthers. This film has people being decapitated, impaled, stabbed, cut, beaten, disembowelled, skewered and generally killed in all kinds of spectacularly fun ways. In fact, as the film ends, the violence becomes so over the top that people quickly go from wincing to laughing at the violence's increasingly cartoonish quality.
The film also has a lot of chasing. Some of it is even reminiscent of that of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar.
Sadly, though, even if you look at Apocalypto simply as an action film, it is still deeply troubled. Aside from the fact that the film is at least half an hour too long and has far too much walking and running around in it, the film simply does not work on an emotional level. For starters, the film spends its first half hour making us care not about the main protagonist but a friend of his (Jaguar's Paw comes across as a bullying child in the first half-hour), Gibson then manages to misplace the film's emotional centre by expecting the film's half hour to effectively keep the emotions flowing for a whole two hours and twenty minutes. Since the first half hour makes the audience bond with the wrong character, such simplistic story telling was never going to work. The result is a film that feels like little more than a series of, admittedly impressive, action sequences strung together by lots of dull walking and running.
Lacking a coherent intellectual message, an emotional centre and anything approaching decent characterisation or dialogue, Apocalypto is a completely empty cinematic experience. With nothing to say and no one to make us care about, Gibson struggles to keep our attention by continuously upping the violence. However, even this backfires because he winds up going too far and crossing the line between brutal realism and cartoonish gore reminiscent of Tarantino's Kill Bill. Far from decrying this film's violence, US critics really should have realised that Apocalypto's violence is the only thing saving it from being a complete disaster.
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