Review of Apocalypto (2006) by Cameron J — 25 Feb 2012

If you respect this film for nothing else, respect it for the poster that is shooting for just every demographic you can think of. It's got "From the Academy Award winning director of" for all of the "Braveheart" nuts, "Passion of the Christ" for all of the religious nuts and finally "Mel Gibson's" for the people who are just plain nuts. No, he's still a rather respectable man, it's just that we don't want to admit it, because at the end of the day, he's still off his rocker, so much so that he made me feel even more skeptical about Apocalypse 2012, because I have a hard time buying that people this insanely grizzly and violent could figure out what loin cloth to wear tomorrow, let alone when the world is going to end. Well, although I'm still calling bull on the 2012 theories, I'm going to give the Mayans a degree of benefit of the doubt, because this is Mel Gibson history and, as we've established, he's so crazy that if he were to write, direct, produce and star in remake of "Blacula" - a film that he would be the last person to even mildly consider touching -, it would probably seem like pulling back for him. No, this film isn't that crazy, but it can be likened to Mel Gibson himself a bit. After all, like Gibson, it's violent, crazy and a little bit racist, but kind of smart. Yeah, and if you thought that statement seemed inconsistent about something's level of intellegence, just wait until you see this movie.

The film opens up with Will Durant's brilliant quote, "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within", then fades into a quiet stare into a Mesoamerican jungle , giving you an idea of just how smart this film is for about three minutes before a tribe brutally kill a pig and then laugh when one of their men gags while eating the testicles his friends jokingly salvaged from the pig for him. After that, the film goes back to intellegence, which still finds itself often broken up but by those kind of gratuitous silly moments - which are rarely terribly fall-flat, but are even more rarely inventive -, as well as moments of gratuitously over-the-top gore to leave the film feeling occasionally inconsistent in its level of intellegence. It doesn't help that those occasions of humor aren't the only wildly conventional moments in this film, because this film plummets into so many cliches within this kind of "Native Tribe Epic" genre, and it's not like the cliches happen occasionally. The conventions aren't constant, but they're frequent enough to say that the gyst of this film is pretty familiar, and while that doesn't make the film that much less enjoyable, it still lands an additional blow to the film's level of intellegence. Of course, even when the film gets back to smart, it hits points where the film becomes to meditative for its own good and gets fairly repetative here and there, leaving the film to lose plenty of steam at plenty of points. Mel Gibson is not at an incompetent director, but neither is he a Kenneth Branagh, in that he's as good of a director as he is a writer, and in the hands of a stronger filmmaker, this film could have really delivered. However, in the hands of a less competent filmmaker, like Roland Emmerich, you'd end up with "10,000 BC" or, at best, a forgettable film, but as it stands, Gibson, as well as others, still have their hearts in this project in this enough to make it worth the watch.

As much I complain about this film getting repetative, I must admit that I was expecting that repetition to be exacerabted by slowness. However, much to my surprise and delight, the film is rarely slow, but when it is, it's not so much slow as in dull, but slow as in meditative, sometimes to a fault, but generally to the film's benefit, as it gives us insight into the themes and tones of the environment and people within that environment, allowing us to see how civilization and savagery organically bonded in this world. This, of course, gives most of the violence substance, and while there are points where that violence is grizzly to the point of being gratuitous, Mel Gibson almost gracefully supplements his story with these harsh actions and events to give the film extra weight and tension, leaving anything from one of his sharply-crafted action sequences to a simply quiet moment in which anything could happen at any time to give you that sense of claustrophobia. You even get that sense of isolation during the most widely scoped shots of the film, because even when this film manages to elegantly gather plenty of sweeping material into one shot, it only further intensifies either the emptiness or lack of security in this world to where the characters feel even more isolated, and by extension, more compelling. Still, neither Mel Gibson nor cinematographer Dean Semler are the only ones selling both this world and the human danger within it, because I was surprised to find how good the acting is in this. Sure, there are no particularly stellar performances, but near everyone is solid, whether they're portraying the fall of loved ones or, even bigger, their whole world as they know it, or simply portraying a struggle to survive. Young leading man Rudy Youngblood, in particular, is charismatic and compelling as a man and warrior that must overcome the dangers and horrors at his back to survive for sake of himself, as well as his family, and with everyone else doing an also, if not equally compelling job at leading they're own subplots, you get a real feeling of this world, complete with all of its humanities and all of the brutality that brought this culture to its crashing end.

In the end, the gratuitous moments of ultra-violence, as well as humor, are rather glaring, though not as much as the many conventions within the story, but what leaves this film to transcend its familiarity and stand as a thoroughly effective thriller is Mel Gibson's clever but brutal portrayal of this world as civilized, yet harsh enough to destroy itself, and with the performers supplementing that tone of humanity intertwined with inhumanity, "Apocalypto" is left a consistently compelling and fascinating study of the final days of the Mayan civilization.

3/5 - Good.