ScreenWize

The end of civilisations and the promise of new beginnings make for appealing drama, and it is the dying embers of the ancient Mayan culture in the early 16th century that Mel Gibson has chosen for his new film Apocalypto. Opening with a quote from historian and philosopher Will Durant, that “a great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”, Gibson seems poised to tell a story of cultural collapse, and perhaps draw parallels with our own times, where fear and ignorance threaten a more enlightened progress. But this endeavour – perhaps too complex for the commercially minded Gibson – is subjugated for a fairly simple and very bloody chase story.

Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is a young married hunter from a small community of forest dwellers. We are introduced to him and the rest of his village through a hunt for a tapir, and the evening storytelling around the fire that follows. This is Gibson’s Eden before the fall, complete with innocent children, happy dancing and friendly pranks. But that night, as Jaguar Paw sleeps with his heavily pregnant wife and young son, he dreams a warning of impending evil, and wakes to find the village under siege by savage Mayans, led by the charismatic and cruel Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo). This is the beginning of a prolonged, brutal and bloody tale, which sees Jaguar Paw separated from his family, enslaved, and taken to a Mayan city that is exhibiting all the signs of paranoid disintegration. It is from this distorted human reality – with its excessive and manipulative religiosity - that he must escape.

Despite the many criticisms of historical and anthropological inaccuracy that have been made by experts on Mesoamerican cultures, the film creates a magnificent sense of place and time through Dean Semler’s soaring photography in the rainforest, the exclusive use of the Yukatek Maya language, and the detailed tattooing and body piercing of all the characters. Despite this, however, the story becomes increasingly ridiculous as it narrows and closes around the heroic exploits of one man running and fighting, and one woman giving birth. With no other narrative line but this, Gibson can only give us an endless series of sadistically violent or treacherously improbable obstacles to be overcome by our heroes, and ultimately leads us not to any greater understanding about the end of days, but to a clichéd romantic hopefulness about where the future may lie.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon