APOCALYPTO review: brutal, bloody and beautiful
Mel Gibson used to be in Australian movies. Then he started doing big American action movies. He kept doing that for a little while, and then suddenly decided to try his hand at directing, finding success with his second effort in the chair with 1995′s Braveheart. Braveheart is brutal, emotional, immersive, and old-fashioned in its sweeping scope and romantic notions, half a decade before Lord Of The Rings kickstarted the trend, and is one of those rare hybrids — a crowd-pleasing critical darling. Gibson’s desire to tell authentic, visceral stories continued with 2004′s The Passion Of The Christ, an overblown retelling of the already historically-dubious account of Jesus’ final day on Earth (before all those other days he had here, or whatever). Which brings us to 2006′s Apocalypto. It shares with Braveheart and Passion a kind of authoratative historical attention to detail, resulting in rich production design, the representation of extinct cultures and languages, and some unflinchingly realistic violence to boot. It’s basically a chase movie, with some simple “my-wife-is-trapped-in-a-whole” stakes, and a vaguely environmentalist message. It’s also really, really fun to watch.
The expository scenes, introducing the alien but familiar culture of the ancient Mayans, serve to set up the idyllic world of our protagonist, Jaguar Paw. He lives in a village full of people with names like Cocoa Leaf and Coffee Bean and Corn Flake, peacefully coexisting with, and occasionally violently harvesting, the gorgeous jungle surrounding the village. It’s remarkable that people still lived like this a mere five hundred years ago, virtually unchanged from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle humans adapted at least a dozen millennia ago, and it’s doubly remarkable to see it on film in the broad, vivid brush strokes Gibson is wont to use in his flicks. Needless to say, shit (in the form of a band of merciless slavers) hits the fan (Jaguar Paw’s village) in the first of the film’s many brutal action scenes. The slavers take anybody worth taking, kill everybody else, and leave the village in flames. The rest of the film follows Jaguar Paw’s often violent attempts to return to the village to rescue his secreted wife and child.
The authentic, period-specific Mayan language used in the film, while immersive, jars with the performances. There are quite a few typically Hollywood facial expressions, postures, and verbal phrasings that are a bit at odds with the language, which, with its irregular stop-start vocabulary, isn’t exactly an easy pill to swallow to begin with. The performances are also a mixed bag: some of the non-actors (and even some of the “real” actors) seem a little self-conscious or confused by the language they’re using. But thankfully, there isn’t much dialogue in the film once the shit hits the fan, and Rudy Youngblood’s performance as the protagonist easily carries the film. A couple of the main antagonists, as well, are brilliant. The actors play with pitch-perfection some unholy, bloodthirsty amalgam of human and animal, which is a sheer joy to watch.
Let’s take a minute to talk about the violence. I’ve said before that there is a distinct and palpable difference between movie violence and realistic violence, the difference between James Bond violence and Starship Troopers violence; the difference between Indiana Jones and Saving Private Ryan violence. Apocalypto is jam-packed with realistic violence, especially from the middle onwards, and it’s so contextually believable that it adds to the stakes of the action far more than any number of wife-stuck-in-cave-praying-for-rescue shots ever could. You’re constantly reminded that violence like this occurred frequently, on a daily basis, everywhere in the world, in every level of society. We fancy ourselves civilised in these modern days, but the fact is that violence like this is still perpetrated all over the globe, especially in the so-called third world countries. The violence here isn’t gratuitous or exploitative, but it’s definitely harrowing and terrifying, especially when you consider how far we haven’t come in the past 500 years.
So now let’s observe the interplay between violence and religion. Faith plays a large part in the representation of Maya culture on display here, and serves as a sterling case of precisely why religion really should go the way of the dinosaurs already. In an effort to tempt the gods into blessing the crops with rain, the priests of the local lands cut the beating hearts out of unwilling slaves and hold them up to the sky. The scene in which this occurs — in slow-mo close-ups, no less — is repulsive and compelling, and it’s even more wrenching because it actually happened — again, every day, all over the globe, in various forms. The theme of the afterlife is also prevalent in Apocalypto, in that sickly comforting “no matter how brutal your death is, at least you’ll be reunited with your dead wife soon” kind of way. It’s fascinating to see a culture unabashedly stuck a step or two below modern secular morality, as unpleasant as that sounds, it’s just entertaining.
So this religious sacrifice is presided over by an emperor / god-king kind of character, who totally condones the wanton slaughter of innocent bystanders in the name of god/s. The emperor is also in charge of a decadent empire, on the verge of backsliding into chaos and confusion. The combination of decadence, religion and government eventually led to the Mayans’ downfall (well, that, and the fact that the Spanish had guns), and it’s a combination that could also be applied to, oh, I don’t know, modern America. Jaguar Paw is just a regular guy who gets fucked by the system — sounds a lot like Average Joe battling his way through the Global Fincancial Crisis, eh? All empires must eventually tumble, especially the decadent, religiously-fanatical ones, if Apocalypto’s history is anything to go by.
So anyway, a visual theme the film employs that I find to be rather nifty is the use of skin as a canvas. Jaguar Paw starts off clean, his body a natural brown, but when he’s marked for sacrifice his body is painted entirely blue, a hideously unnatural colour, so when he makes the treacherous plunge into the relative safety of the jungle, the blue is washed off to be replaced by the brown mud of his home jungle. It’s cool that he visually goes from being owned by a crazy priest to being marked as one of the jungle, a fun little bit of movie magic to track through the course of the narrative.
Apocalypto‘s main flaw is an overabundance of concessions to mainstream Hollywood. The aforementioned American-styled performances and deliveries contribute to this problem, as does the overblown, melodramatic score. The main offender is a particular shot Gibson apes from The Lord Of The Rings in which the main character looks up at the camera with wide eyes as their head is tilted down. This is pretty dramatic the first couple of times you see it, but Gibson uses it over and over and over again to the point of saturation. Another little thing is the digital photography — if you’re a pure filmophile, the 16:9 ratio and too-smooth movement could hamper your enjoyment. Oh, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the movie would be a hell of a lot better if it didn’t keep cutting the Jaguar Paw’s wife stuck at the bottom of a cave. Every time momentum or tension is built, the movie drops a gear in favour of checking in with the beloved. The movie’s told primarily from Jaguar Paw’s point of view, so these breaks in narrative stall the tension and don’t really help add to the stakes — the brutal violence fills that role. I don’t know if entirely cutting these scenes would destroy the movie, but I think there’d be a lot more tension if we don’t even know the wife is alive until right at the very end.
So Apocalypto is a fun, bloody chase movie, big on realism and immersion. The jungle setting is simultaneously gorgeous and frightening, the make-up and costumes are fascinating and unique, the story-line is a tad worn but not overused enough to be disappointing, and the stunning, repulsive, compelling world Apocalypto peeks into is a real treat. Catch it for the simple chase elements alone, and the totally alien nature of the characters and culture, but don’t leave your thinking cap behind — there’s some intellectual pleasure to be had here as well.
