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Apocalypse, always

Mel Gibson revels in another passionate bloodletting
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 31st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Fleeing the temple of doom. Rudy Youngblood on the run in Apocalypto.
Mel Gibson’s latest cavalcade of butchery is an odd film indeed, beside the fact that its actors all speak in the Yukatek Mayan language. That there is a definite artistry apparent in this effort does distinguish Apocalypto from, say, the Saw franchise, though its gallons of gore are just as lovingly flung on the screen. But to what end?
Gibson is obviously a man of sadistic tendencies who also lacks a proper appreciation for historical accuracy — two facts made abundantly evident in his work as a director. He’s also an adherent to a primitive form of Catholicism that has imbued his personal philosophy (and aesthetic) with the taint of racism as well as an immature understanding of the concept of redemption. All of these qualities are on parade in Apocalypto.
Yet, as with Leni Riefenstahl’s brilliant Triumph of the Will, there’s no need to kill the messenger for the message, however poisonous it may be. Apocalypto is hardly in the same category as Riefenstahl’s achievement, but it does show that Gibson has a distinctive mastery of filmmaking.
Apocalypto is set at the apex of Maya civilization, though it will take us half the film to realize it, as Gibson’s story opens in the jungles of the Yucatan, where a village of natives attempts to lead lives in accordance with the dictates of nature and customs. They’re a hearty lot of hunters and gatherers, as tattooed and labret-pierced as any disaffected youth in the contemporary urban jungles of today.
Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is a young man who is as brave as he is sensitive. His wife (Dalia Hernandez) is on the verge of giving birth to his second child, and Jaguar Paw is, compared to the other marital relationships on view in the community, almost uxorious in attending to her.
Storming into this primeval glade comes a band of warriors, which burns and butchers the inhabitants while finding the youngest and fittest to enslave. Jaguar Paw manages to hide his family in an underground cave before he himself is captured and marched off into the center of Maya culture.
The greatest part of Gibson’s film is this forced march out of a paradise lost. Jungle gives way to depleted, over-logged forests, which in turn lead to the outskirts of a major city, complete with all the suggested suburban squalor of our time. This slow approach into the Maya Mecca is brilliantly captured by Gibson, ending, finally, at the foot of one of the mighty pyramids.
While the women of Jaguar Paw’s tribe are sold into whoredom or worse, the men are painted blue (as blue as the woad-daubed Braveheart) and pushed to the top of the pyramid, where they are to be sacrificed to the local gods.
From here, Apocalypto becomes something like Jaguar Paw and the Temple of Doom, with our hero barely missing having his still-beating heart presented to the religious mob by the high priest. Pursued, he dashes back into the jungle, and the film’s final half becomes a standard chase saga. It ends, as I must reveal for argument’s sake, with the arrival of the conquistadors, complete with a priest in the drag of a Dominican brandishing the cross.
Apocalypto

irected by Mel Gibson
With Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Raoul Trujillo and Mauricio Amuy Tenorio

That hundreds of years separate Maya power from the actual arrival of the Spanish is a small point to Gibson, as are a few other anachronisms (smallpox somehow beats the Spanish ashore). But it’s important for him to present this arriving horde of Christians as the bloodthirsty Mayas’ salvation. Why?
The answer lies with the film’s epigraph by historian Will Durant: “A great civilization is not destroyed from without until it is destroyed from within.” The modern equivalencies that one can detect within Gibson’s Mayas are quite purposeful. Gibson believes that the West has entered a period of decadence that only a return to the cross can cure.
The inherent irony in this (besides the eventual holocaust unleashed by the Catholic Church in the Americas) is that Gibson pretends to be shocked by the excesses of his Mayas, while simultaneously whittling viscera from his unlimited supply of film-extra victims. Ultimately, can anything be more decadent than a director who rolls in blood like a dog while criticizing the transgressions of his times? Surely, Christ said something about that somewhere.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


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