Grotesque filmmaking at its best. Review on Apocalypto Movie

I hated this movie. Hated it because it was a shoddy attempt at making a film which is supposed to matter – in some curious, lopsided way. There is no doubt that it was hugely awaited – but coming from Mel Gibson, whose last movie *The Passion of the Christ, *was loud, gory and unimpressive, I never had high expectations from it.

*Spoiler warning – plot details follow

The very first part of the movie consists of a few ruthless gags which make it amply clear that Gibson has no interest in actually trying to understand the Mayan people. There is a joke on the scrotum, and one on the mighty warrior who has been shooting blanks, and finally a joke on the pens. Of course, this did inspire a few laughs from the audience of the theater I was watching it in, and affected a similar cringe from me. Gibson’s analysis of the Mayan people is more flawed than I had imagined it was going to be. The only thing that you feel is that the Mayans are a group of happy-go-lucky people who have fun hunting animals, having sx with their wives and make fun of each other private parts. Then comes along the evil tribe, which has clear intentions of capturing all of them and making them human sacrifices. The hero of the movie is Jaguar Paw. Believe me, even this incited some in the audience to snicker, I don’t know why. Jaguar wants to save his wife and children, so he places them in a well. Subsequently the well is where they would breathe their last. This mostly constitutes the first half of the movie. The second half is when the hero, miraculously, escapes from the evil tribe, aided by a solar eclipse(oh! How so very authentic and unique), and thus starts the chase. The chase goes on for the better part of an hour, consisting of age-old tactics, and some exceptionally gory and terrible scenes of slaughter and violence. On his tail are groups of snarling tribesmen who won’t give up until they have caught and slaughtered him. At this point of time in the film, unfortunately, it starts raining, making life miserable for the wife and kids who are hiding in the well, because it starts to fill up. That’s when they decide that instead of floating up to the top and getting captured by the evil tribe, they would drown in the water. That’s in a nutshell, the plot of the movie.

There were several reasons this movie failed me. One of them was the mindless gore and violence. There are a lot of scenes which are definitely not for the faint-hearted. You have numerous scenes of beheading, several animals getting killed in unimaginably horrifying ways, blood spurting in all directions, heads bouncing on the stairways of the Mayan temples, and hearts getting ripped out of living chests. It’s a gore-feast, and for those who are turned on by this, the movie is a virtual godsend. For me it was a torturous two hours in the theater, pretending to look at the screen, and ending up cringing.

Of course, it’s amply clear that Gibson spent absolutely no time in researching the history of the Mayan civilization. Instead he chooses to fill the movie with amazingly stupid and clichéd rituals like decapitation of prisoners, and as already mentioned *ripping enemies’ hearts out of their chests. *This is despite the fact that most history textbooks teach us that the Mayan civilization was one of the civilizations to have developed an actual written language and also advanced mathematical and astronomical systems. This has all been selectively ignored by Gibson, who would rather concentrate on the savage customs of the civilization.

The only part of the movie where Gibson’s movie making talents show in any perceptible way is the filming of the chase through the forest. There are lots of clever traps to slow down the pursuers and Jaguar Paw’s innovation and intelligence are put into good use. Of course, there is no let-down on the violence aspect even in this part of the movie, and to say it is gruesome would be making a gross understatement.

But even with the expert filming of the chase-sequence, Apocalypto as a movie, surely disappoints. However, it doesn’t disappoint alarmingly, since I had never had high expectations from Gibson and his kind of storytelling. There is this tendency to look at the Mayan culture as a different and exotic one, one that is defined by savagery and not the principles which Western civilization has come to denote. There is absolutely no attempt to understand the beliefs of the Mayan people, and in the end, you realize that he just wanted to show some bouncing heads. Gibson, all through his film-making has suffered from a tendency to paint characters in uniform black and white, frequently without explanation. *Apocalypto *suffers from the same flaw.

Eventually, *Apocalypto *is a movie which is going to be accepted by a few and rejected outright by others. However, as a viewer who would rather think of an exotic civilization as something *more *than just savage, I find it an amazingly lousy film – something which makes me watch *City of God *till the wee hours of the morning to restore faith in filmmaking.