Directed by: Mel Gibson
With the whole drunken diatribe aside, I find it difficult to figure out Mel Gibson's choices of material to direct. He has directed four films: The Man Without A Face (which I had only seen parts of), Braveheart (which won Gibson two Oscars and is a stirring action epic), The Passion Of The Christ (which is a high-budget snuff film), and now Apocalytpo, which seems to combine elements of Braveheart and The Passion Of The Christ.
Except for some obvious CGI inserts, such as a falling tree and one warrior tackling another, Apocalypto was pretty well made, but it's a rather unpleasant and depressing tale that winds up as basically a chase film with buckets of blood and gore, as if Gibson is trying to show the viewer various ways blood can gush from a head wound.
The plot of the film is fairly simple. A tribe of Mayans who live peacefully in a pre-Spanish settlement Central American forest are raided and captured by an aggressive tribe looking to take them to the eye of the Mayan empire as potential slaves or sacrifices to the gods. The film winds up centering mostly on Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young man who protects his pregnant wife and son during the raid by hiding them in a well. The family is stranded in the well as Jaguar Paw and his other tribemates are taken hostage; hoping to survive while hoping Jaguar Paw will return to them in a big hurry.
Wounded and tired, the hostages go on a days-long journey to the Mayan capital (or what passed for a capital in those days). What happens here is rather gruesome, but is probably historically accurate. There are lots of noisy crowds, things for sale, and the big pyramid which is the center of the day's entertainment. The steps leading up to the top are covered in blood from severed heads and bodies that are tossed down them after the high priests made their sacrifices to the gods. What are the sacrifices? Well, on nearly three occasions, the high priest reaches into a man's chest and pulls out a beating heart, which he then burns while the now heartless (literally) sacrifice stares in terror at the whole ordeal.
I'm no doctor, but I would assume that once a heart is ripped from your body, you won't get much of a chance to be terrified of anything, since the shock and loss of blood would cause almost instant death. But since we're talking about a film here, why was it necessary to show two men having their hearts ripped out? Isn't once enough to get the point? I remember in Braveheart when William Wallace was eviscerated at the end, but this was implied and never seen. I guess Gibson got over his shyness about showing such things. That or he just didn't want to show it when it was happening to him.
After a couple of near-death episodes, Jaguar Paw escapes to the forests with his captors chasing him. That leaves me with two questions: 1. Why does it seem to take him a lot less time to get back home from the capital than it did to get to the capital from home? 2. What happened to the other captives since it appears every one of the remaining captors chased Jaguar Paw and left the captives behind?
The movie runs about 2 hours and 15 minutes and although it has a lot of action, there is little energy in the whole enterprise. Jaguar Paw's plight didn't arouse much sympathy from me, since it took me nearly half of the movie to differentiate between the characters in the first place.
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