By Matt Zoller Seitz
Mel Gibson’s Mayan fable Apocalypto is one of the most viscerally powerful and intensely upsetting movies of the year. But it’s not the shots of severed heads, vivisected torsos and pierced flesh that disturb; it’s the closeups of those who witness or perpetrate violence. The latter are the cinematic version of what gamblers call “tells” – incidental gestures that reveal the filmmaker’s intent. The greatness of the movie’s brutal, tragic first half -- which charts a Mayan tribe’s enslavement by a nation-state of militant, human-sacrificing cultists – can be found in close-ups of human faces while suffering is inflicted or endured. Men are strangled in their marriage beds by unseen assailants; women are threatened with rape and sexual servitude while their hogtied husbands look on, weeping with rage; an enemy soldier picks up a screaming child and hurls him like a medicine ball, just to see what happens.
This horrific sadism is not an abstraction, much less a thug’s provocation. Nor is it, as some ungenerous and unobservant critics have claimed, “fetishistic.” John Woo’s violence could be described as fetishistic, because it’s all about light and shadow, rhythm and color; the people are abstracted in death, like dancers, or figures in a mural. But in the first half of Apocalypto, Gibson is moved by simple human routines, and appalled by viciousness that disrupts of destroys those routines. He brings a John Fordian cornball sense to the knockabout first-act slapstick (the hero’s warrior dad gives a rub-on aphrodisiac to a fellow warrior who can’t get it up – and we discover it was a vicious prank when the warrior stumbles out of his tent fanning his burning genitals, followed by his wife, who needs a drink of water right now). He photographs the hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), doting on his pregnant wife, Seven (Dalia Hernandez), with an intimate comfort that only a father could summon; 
Gibson even shows the subcutaneous bulge caused by the infant’s kicking against the wall of mom’s womb, and photographs it with real tenderness, as if he’s never gotten over what a miracle it is. And when the thugs invade and dismantle Jaguar Paw’s village, forcing him to hide his wife and son in a pit that’s like a deep well, Gibson plainly demonstrates the absence of morality that's the hallmark of bullies, from Roman Centurions, Inquisitors and Gestapo through soccer hooligans and street-corner gangstas. He makes the depiction of brutality as frankly upsetting -- and hyper-realistically protracted -- as possible, to jolt you out of your moviegoer’s jadedness and make you feel sadness, nausea, righteous anger, something. Any reaction will do, as long as it’s not indifference.
Indeed, Gibson makes a case for indifference to suffering as the greatest of human crimes -- the one from which all others spring. The most chilling images in the movie are the reaction shots of those who look upon sadistic cruelty either with glee or with no particular opinion. In the human sacrifice sequence, for instance, Gibson repeatedly cuts between close-ups of the high priest (Fernando Hernandez) presiding over the heart removals, decapitations and mass chantings, and the nearby king (Rafael Velez), who’s so anesthetized by drugs or by exposure to mass murder (perhaps both) that he barely seems to have a pulse. You can’t even say he’s lost in thought, because his dead face and slack body (it seems to be merging with the throne) suggest that he has no thoughts to get lost in. Equally shocking – maybe more so, because it’s funny – is the reaction of the queen (Diana Botello) when the high priest finishes sacrificing his first victim in the sequence and moves on to the second. The latter’s suffering is depicted partly from the victim’s own point-of-view – a surprising, formally risky touch that compels identification – but midway through, Gibson cuts to the queen, who rolls her eyes as if to say, “Please, not this again.” 
Gibson’s right-on attitude toward cruelty and suffering is schizophrenically juxtaposed with one that’s more familiar, less deep, and in this context, a lot more problematic: a R-rated action star’s very '80s impulse toward pulp cartoonishness and gross-out showboating. Both qualities lope to the fore during Apocalypto’s second hour. At the film’s halfway mark -- after Jaguar Paw escapes his tormentors and races home through the jungle to reunite with his young son and pregnant wife, who are still trapped in a pit where he hid them -- the soulful, penetrating close-ups that typify the movie’s first half are supplanted by more stylized, even cliched action close-ups: Zen pulp brooding and badass pre-fight stares reminiscent of anime, videogames and martial arts pictures. The replacement of one type of close-up with another coincides with the movie’s transformation from a primal fable about individual lives shattered by oppression (like the slave ship scenes in Amistad or the Kristillnacht sequence in Schindler’s List by way of Edgar Rice Burroughs) to a more conventional, revenge-driven, fight-and-flight action picture, hugely indebted to Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey, the Rambo and Mad Max trilogy, Martin Campbell’s underappreciated No Escape, and Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans, from which Gibson borrows not just situations and setpieces, but certain iconic shots. (Gibson’s cinematographer is the great Dean Semler, who shot The Road Warrior, Dances with Wolves and The Alamo; his trademark combination of flamboyant high-speed crane moves and hair-trigger rack focuses gives the action an omniscient wondrousness -- we’re everywhere at once.)
This is the kind of movie where the hero sustains an arrow wound to his torso that should lay him up for weeks, yet keeps racing homeward at Jesse Owens velocity, leaping off thousand-foot-high waterfalls (a Mohicans setpiece so often pilfered that it should be retired for a while), climbing tall trees to elude his foes, outrunning a hungry jaguar and improvising a blowgun from a hollow reed, a handful of thorns and a poison tree frog. You don’t question it because by the time Apocalypto shifts into run-through-the-jungle mode, Gibson has already established (via a curse laid on the bad guys by a plague-stricken orphan girl) that Jaguar Paw is a prophesied savoir who’s preordained to escape his tormentors and inflict payback (a warrior favored by his god), and because tall-tale absurdity is catnip to the imagination no matter what century you’re living in. One could argue, persuasively, that Apocalypto is not more subject to plausibility gripes than the mayhem described in The Iliad: “"He brought him down with a glinting jagged rock/Massive, top of the heap behind the rampart's edge/No easy lift for a fighter even in prime strength/Working with both hands, weak as men are now/Giant Ajax hoisted it high and hurled it down/crushed the rim of the fighter's four-horned helmet/and cracked his skull to splinters, bloody pulp.” 
But the plausibility of action and the depiction of its kinetic particulars are different things; when we consider them, we circle back to the matter of “tells” – and in the second half of Apocalypto, the tells are not flattering to Gibson. The violence in the second half is far less serious and disturbing than Homer’s violence – and for that matter, Peckinpah’s violence in The Wild Bunch, Scorsese’s in Taxi Driver and Goodfellas and (since Gibson dares direct comparison) Mann’s violence in the more elegant, politically and morally subtle Mohicans. The first hour is hyper-real while maintaining a grip on reality (it’s the emotions that are strategically exaggerated, not the brutality itself); the second is more abstracted and shallow -- a series of Olympic-velocity foot chases and t-shirt-ready iconic poses (including an image of Jaguar Paw rising from a quicksand pit that’s Apocalypse Now by way of Predator).
It’s impossible to say whether Gibson is straining after the mythic and settling for the cartoonish or if his filmmaking sensibility is so conditioned by his long stint as an R-rated action superstar that he just can’t help reverting. In any event, the second half seems intended less to confirm eternal facts about the human species than to make Friday night crowds recoil and then laugh at the director’s class clown audacity. (Maybe this is another eternal fact: people don't mind being challenged if you pander, too.) An animal attacking a man’s face gets multiple, super-tight closeups, the better to show you the skin and muscle coming off; near the end of the movie, a warrior falls to his knees after a coup-de-grace and stares blankly into space while a thin jet of blood sprays from his opened skull, Holy Grail-style. It’s kewl, no doubt. But in artistic seriousness, it’s not far removed from the scene in Commando where Arnold exits the toolshed and shears off the top of an enemy’s head by backhanding a circular saw blade, Frisbee-style.
None of this should suggest that the second half of Apocalypto is unworthy of attention. On the contrary, it’s one of the most relentless and thrilling pulp action movies ever. I wrote in a March 10, 2004 NYPress column about The Passion of the Christ that “Gibson is the most visually gifted movie star to pick up a camera since Charles Laughton made The Night of the Hunter back in 1955"; from its frantic lateral tracking shots (seen through a high-def video image, the reflected sunlight on wet leaves blurs into quivering tracer streaks) to its god’s-eye view of Seven and her son in the pit, to the cutaway to the wind-buffeted trees when Jaguar Paw’s father dies (like he’s watching his own soul escape), Apocalypto makes me glad I went out on that limb. That horrific yet empathetic first half is so Passion of the Christ-like –richly imagined but emotionally direct, and unusually attuned to suffering – that it resonates throughout the he-man action of the second half, and gives it a serious aura that it only partly deserves. It all comes back to emotional heft. Gibson establishes this story’s stakes at the outset, and they’re resolutely human-scaled. This is Mayan history told not by a professor, but by a pop mythmaker who’s grown richer than most studio bosses, yet retains a working Joe's sensibility – a fondness for the lowball gag, the sentimental moment, the flamboyant exaggeration. In retrospect, the opening portentous quote from Will Durant (“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”) feels like a bait-and-switch. Gibson runs away from specific political analogy, from politics generally, while holding onto a muscular spiritualism. Apocalypto is historically and politically resonant in the way that Stagecoach is, which is to say, not very. It's deliberately mythopoetic and ahistorical; it's Fanfare for the Common Warrior, driving home the fact that when great upheavals occur, non-elite citizens are less interested in arguing the fine points of philosophy, spirituality or patriotism than in getting themselves and their loved ones the hell out of Dodge. Like Odysseus, Jaguar Paw labors under expectations of leadership, but ultimately his frenzied quest is about his own survival and his family’s (his progeny’s). He just wants to reunite with his wife and son and watch his new child being born. But it's not easy, because from ground level, history is just one damned thing after another -- a point that's etched in bronze with the film's final image, arguably the greatest action movie punchline since Chuck Heston found lady liberty face-down in the sand.
So any sense of letdown is relative: Apocalypto goes from being transcendently great to being merely beautiful and thrilling – from being unlike anything you seen to being a version of something you’ve seen many times, with some idiosyncratic, sometimes stunningly unique touches. That qualifier “merely” judges the movie only in relation to itself; Apocalypto’s feverish intensity is music for the eyes.
Monday, December 11, 2006
Savage art: Mel Gibson's Apocalypto
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38 comments:
I thought it was a substantially cruder piece of work than that -- so much so that the appearance of the jaguar and its cub threw me far out of the picture. Wild cats are so beautiful and naturally graceful that the rhythm of the movie seemed thudding, clumping in contrast.
Also, and this may be an unfair criticism, in light of some of Matt's observations above about Gibson's inculcated sensibility, the lack of imagination or abandonment of action-movie convention ("My father!" "My son!"), apart from the acknowledgedly very unusual Mayan and Meso-American setting, was disappointing.
Finally, it occurred to me a little less than halfway through, though it should have occurred to me much earlier, that most if not all of the important characters looked far, far more like the members of North American tribes than Mayans or other Meso-American native minorities. I think the failure of imagination there, though, is the fault of the audience, from which I can't except myself.
Excellent review, Matt. I can't think of a critic who is more able at parsing out the varied sections of a movie than you, at acknowledging that no film is a totally unified whole but rather a sum of disparate parts.
Interesting take on the film Matt, but I found the film's tone to be quite pulpy throughout and, thusly, was no more moved by the unsettlingly "real" violence of the first hour and change than I was less moved by the "movie" violence of the film's second half. I saw the razing of Jaguar Paw's village in the first act to be fairly straight-up dehumanizing of your enemy type stuff, not all that different from the early sequences in Braveheart where the British ravage the wives of the Scotts, so when we get around to our heroes swinging maces and cracking skulls our collective blood-lust has been building to a froth. I'm sure if the Snake Ink character had a mustache instead of a bone through his nose he would have been twirling the ends of it Sidney Whiplash-style as he cackles at our heroes being dangled over the side of a cliff, tethered together to a giant board. The final run through the jungle merely felt like Gibson paying off the action film conventions he'd deposited throughout (will our hero’s family escape from the bottom of the well? Tune in next week same Apocalpto-time... same Apocalypto-place!). What you see as unrealistic action-movie clichés (such as the amount of damage Jaguar Paw withstands) I think are consistent throughout (let's not forget the big ol’ honking dues ex machina which spares JP when his head's literally on the chopping block). I largely saw the film as a goof; a straight up action film relocated and recontextualized into an alien setting that was vividly told with blood-drawing (literally) precision. The difference between this film and Passion (which I despised) as I never felt the sense I was supposed to be taking some larger spiritual meaning from watching some nice people get their teeth kicked in for two hours. Be cruel and exploitive all you want Mel, but please don't try and use those same qualities to guilt-trip me into believing.
Matt, excellent writing. I don't want to see this film and you almost, ALMOST made me go see it.
To quote you: "He makes the depiction of brutality as frankly upsetting – and hyper-realistically protracted -- as possible, to jolt you out of your moviegoer’s jadedness and make you feel sadness, nausea, righteous anger, something. Any reaction will do, as long as it’s not indifference."
But I have a question: So, he makes us see that violence is real and has bloody consequences.
And that's somehow new or revelatory exactly how? I got the same sense of violence's sickening cost from Clint Eastwood's FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, and many a movie over the years. That's not exactly a new statement, is it? My question is the context. Eastwood and anti-war filmmakers are at least telling us something about wars and why we wage them (or, since that's not new, reminding us again as a modern parallel). Does APOCALYPTO have the same vision? Do we really know if Gibson is revealing history as it was (and my understanding is that nobody really knows), or just using it as a cover for a bloody good show? And is the savagery which Gibson takes such visceral interest in really telling us anything about our nature? My theory, and it's just a theory since I haven't seen it (but I have seen Braveheart), is that his film is no different than these slasher films of late, albeit with better filmmaking and story technique and star power. If there's no real reason for the violence, no true, historical context for its depiction of suffering, how does it teach us anything beyond what any feeling human being already knows? Isn't that just a way to say he made a cool, exciting action movie and I dig it? I guess I'm not questioning your right to enjoy violent movies (I do, too), but aren't we being disingenuous in our need to find some reason to justify it? Why are we drawn to blood and butchery and violence on screen when it's put together in an artful way? I'm not making any judgements on it, but i think it's damn interesting to ponder.
(let's not forget the big ol’ honking dues ex machina which spares JP when his head's literally on the chopping block).
Not really -- the point was that the king and his henchmen specifically scheduled the sacrifice when they knew an eclipse was coming, so that they could fool the populace into believing that the sacrifice had appeased the gods.
Not really -- the point was that the king and his henchmen specifically scheduled the sacrifice when they knew an eclipse was coming, so that they could fool the populace into believing that the sacrifice had appeased the gods.
So it's just a coincidence it came then as opposed to after Jaguar Paw's head was sent rolling down the pyramid, dooming his family to watery death? How about that.
"Why are we drawn to blood and butchery and violence on screen when it's put together in an artful way? I'm not making any judgements on it, but i think it's damn interesting to ponder."
That's one for the ages, and no amount of symposia will ever hope to get to the bottom of it. It's like the camera movement which combines a forward dolly and reverse zoom, ever-receeding.
Indeed, Apocalypto is mesmerizing, brutish, and audacious, even as its worth slips away. I asked myself at the end, "now why did I need to see that?" And even now I can't shake what I saw. Intellectually, one might go towards the negative with it, but viscerally, this thing completely grabs you. I couldn't look away. Btw, Dean Semler's work was impressive enough, but it had nothing on Caleb Deschanel's achievement on "TPOTC".
Gibson the filmmaker is a fascinating case. I can think of no other director who approaches filmmaking as a series of tribulations, liturgical stations, if you will. Gibson is a clown, a nortorious prankster. His work is part masochistic ordeal, part guilt-fueled exercise in expiation, he's a delirious pop Nietzschian, each work is one more step in his will to power. Gibson even thoroughly trumps Scorsese, another impassioned Catholic, in his ferverish desire to believe ever-more deeply.
With each blood-soaked image, Gibson ups the ante. He tests himself. "This is how deeply I believe", he seems to be saying. "What about you?" It's not enough that he's able to construct his own house of worship to support his particular form of Catholicism, he uses film as another aspect of that construct.
"Gibson even thoroughly trumps Scorsese, another impassioned Catholic, in his ferverish desire to believe ever-more deeply."
I don't know if Gibson trumps Scorsese--a superior filmmaker, I feel--so much as he shows less layers of ambivalence or thought towards his desire to believe. You get a sense from Scorsese's films that he feels he wants to believe (and that he feels guilty for not doing so unquestioningly) but that a more intellectually rigorous part of him questions the process and even the very need for belief. An altogether more complicated game.
Matt, I read each of the linked reviews posted the other day. As a group, quite telling about the particular polarization that Mel Gibson sparks. There was love, hate, and then the more dispassionate takes which essentially said some version of "very effective action flick, not profound movie making."
Your piece, so far in my surveying, stands alone. I don't mean to make this a who wrote the best review review; I couldn't even, as I haven't seen the movie -- I haven't even seen The Passion -- and each of the other reviews strengthened my curiosity about Apocalypto. Nevertheless, you are saying this is a nearly profound film that unfortunately, in the end settles for, to put it much more simplistically than you did, a very well shot -- beautiful, in fact -- action picture.
But along the way you tease apart some extremely slippery and difficult to articulate nuances with a kind of rigor that I appreciate greatly. It would be more meaningful to me, of course, if I'd seen the film, but as I may never, due largely to squeamishness, I wanted to write this now.
A little off-topic, I know, but if you want to see a movie with unflinchingly "real" violence that takes an abrupt left turn into 80's action tropes, you simply must check out BLOOD DIAMOND. I like to think of myself as a rational, articulate man, but -- should I ever meet him -- I will only be able to tell Ed Zwick that his movie is bullshit.
"Tells" and close-ups: what an insightful approach to this film, Matt. Thank you so much for your engaging articulations.
Hey, want to see something interesting? Go watch the teaser trailer that came out around this time last year -- practically every shot is essentially a rough draft of one in the final film, and the lead actor is completely different! Signs of an extremely troublesome production, or simply of a very extensive test shoot?
thanks for sharing your thoughts...
i hate it when films throw in violence not for the sake of the film's content...just for shock value...
that's how I felt when I saw the patriot...it was all unccesary blood.
--RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
Thanks for the feedback, everybody. I appreciate the encouragement -- I haven't posted many full-length reviews in a while, and I'm still finding my sea legs, so I wasn't sure how this one would turn out.
A few quick responses:
rasselas writes, "I thought it was a substantially cruder piece of work than that -- so much so that the appearance of the jaguar and its cub threw me far out of the picture. Wild cats are so beautiful and naturally graceful that the rhythm of the movie seemed thudding, clumping in contrast...Also, and this may be an unfair criticism, in light of some of Matt's observations above about Gibson's inculcated sensibility, the lack of imagination or abandonment of action-movie convention ("My father!" "My son!"), apart from the acknowledgedly very unusual Mayan and Meso-American setting, was disappointing."
I can't disagree more about the movie having a thudding, clumping rhythm. One of the things that impresses me the most about Gibson is his sense of rhythm and architecture, the way most, nearly all, of his last three movies seem to unreel continuously and confidently, so that they seem to be all of a piece rather than being broken into sections.
I say that knowing full well that some contributors to this blog -- Steven Boone, Odienator and Andrew Dignan spring to mind -- have serious problems with Gibson's visual/editing sensibility, and think him a glossy sensationalist, or something like that; to me, Gibson's work on "Braveheart," "The Passion" and "Apocalypto" remind me of Zhang Yimou's "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers" and Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" and "The Getaway" and Joan Chen's rarely-seen, woefully underappreciated "Xiu-Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl," to name a few movies that are musically propulsive, more about continuity of emotion than getting from plot point to plot point.
I don't think it's faint praise at all to say that Gibson is, first and foremost, an action filmmaker, in that he's literally most interested in what people do, and how they feel as they're doing it, and how their bodies (and spirits, to go cosmic, why not?) move through space, and seems predisposed to keep viewers in a kind of boundless present tense. He seems possessed; he's a terrifying filmmaker in a lot of ways, not just because of his technical facility (whether the movies are heavily storyboarded, as "Braveheart" and "The Passion" were, or a mix of storyboarded and caught-on-the-fly, psuedo-documentary moments, as is the case with "Apocalypto") but because his sensibility is so blunt, so frankly base, in that it forces audiences to acknowledge humankind's animal nature, the sweat and blood and other fluids, the nonrational drives that impel both individual decisions and mass hysteria (his last three films all contain sections that are among the best arguments against getting wrapped up in community sentiment every committed to the big screen).
Where was I? Oh, right -- that said, I agree with rasselas that the lack of abandonment of action movie convention is a flaw. The second half of the movie, beautifully constructed and gripping as it is, simply is not as uncannily powerful as the first half, because the chase-and-fight/ guerilla improvisation / revenge movie tropes are too familiar.
Which brings me to Andrew's assertion that there's not much difference between the first and second halves. I disagree. What struck me about the first half -- what set it apart from the second in a big way -- was the sense of reality. From the hunt in the beginning to the village invastion to the Bataan-death-march trek through the jungle (with the bone-through-the-nose footsoldier tormenting his captives out of childish glee and boredom, just to keep himself amused, like a kid futzing with a science experiment, or that opening of "The Wild Bunch" with the children watching a scorpion fight off ants, then setting the whole anthill on fire) to the sequence in and around the temple (with the slave auction and that stunning exchange of closeups between Jaguar Paw, his friend, the high priest, the king and the queen -- the juxtaposition of sheer terror and decadent, noncommittal, utterly inhuman viciousness), what always came through was a sense of helplessness, of humans trapped in a horrendous situation and not being able to do a goddamned thing except grin and bear it, and their tormentors getting off on the fact of their helplessness. Yes, the general outline isn't much different from the old Snidely Whiplash routine that so many hard-R action movies traffic in (Clint Eastwood's done a lot of this sort of thing, though not that much since "Unforgiven"). But the particulars are distinctive and real and very serious. Gibson's intuitive understanding of what it feels like to have your freedom taken from you -- the present-tense despair, the sense that you're trapped in a nightmare, or being pulled down slowly into quicksand -- floored me. It reminded me less of the usual sadistic action movie setpieces (designed to get you primed for righteous payback) than of some of the most powerful and absurd and utterly credible moments in "Amistad" and "Schindler's List" (think of Amon Goeth taking potshots at camp inmates from his balcony, or that Stanley Kubrick-like, blackly comedic scene where a young Jewish female inmate warns the camp guards that a particular building is being poorly constructed, and the commander weighs the evidence, deems it persuasive, then tells his men to rebuild according to her suggestions, and shoot her in the head). Given all this, yes, the second half could not help but seem a letdown.
There's a caveat, though: We're not watching a free will action movie here, but a fable, a fairytale, a myth. Jaguar Paw has superhuman constitution and resourcefulness not just because he's hell bent on getting back to his family (and I love the fact that that's his only motivation -- that he doesn't go back to the temple and free everyone, because finding his way back home is already impossible enough) but also because, maybe more-so because, he's preordained to win; he's protected by higher powers, like a figure from Greek or North American Indian or Japanese myth. Somebody up there likes him. I suppose you could call that a cop-out, but I'm not sure how, since Gibson foregrounds it in that scene where the little girl lays a curse on the enemy soldiers and pretty much tells them everything that's going to happen in the second half -- every signpost on Jaguar Paw's journey toward mythic ass-kicking hero-dom, every Station of the Cross, if you will.
I wonder, if our minds aren't inclined to work that way, is that Gibson's fault, or the fault of an industrialized, secular mindset that can't be excited by any story that doesn't hew to contemporary Western ideals of free will and self-determination? Moral and spiritual forces are pushing Jaguar Paw along; he's like a sailboat catching just the right gust of wind and zipping toward his destination.
So my problem, then, is not with the conception of Jaguar Paw's odyssey, but as you say, the language (visual language) in which it's expressed. It's just too much like typical action film cartoonishness. The depth of imagination and empathy displayed in the first hour or so gets displaced by a sort of action movie pantomime, a dusting off of too-familiar confrontations and resolutions (though Gibson throws a few wicked curves along the way -- Jaguar Paw eluding his pursuers by climbing a tree is an action movie cliche, and so is his presence being betrayed by a blood drop, but the punchline -- the cutaway from Jaguar Paw staring into the eyes of a Jaguar, then the cut back to him running madly through the jungle directly toward his foes, and the very clever REVEAL of the jaguar who might be running after him but seems to be running WITH him -- is brilliant, I think).
That Little Round-Headed Boy's question is too multifaceted to answer in one shot -- it's a topic for a book, not a response in a blog comment thread -- so I'm going to crap out on you now and just break off a little piece of it.
TLR-HB writes, ": So, he makes us see that violence is real and has bloody consequences.
And that's somehow new or revelatory exactly how? I got the same sense of violence's sickening cost from Clint Eastwood's FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS, and many a movie over the years. That's not exactly a new statement, is it? My question is the context. Eastwood and anti-war filmmakers are at least telling us something about wars and why we wage them (or, since that's not new, reminding us again as a modern parallel). Does APOCALYPTO have the same vision? Do we really know if Gibson is revealing history as it was (and my understanding is that nobody really knows), or just using it as a cover for a bloody good show? And is the savagery which Gibson takes such visceral interest in really telling us anything about our nature?"
I don't think Gibson has any interested in detailing, much less revealing, history. He decided on ancient Mayan history because the jungle is a hell of a photogenic place to shoot an action movie, and it gives him a fun excuse to make the confrontations and chases as primitive (meaning kinetically violent and rough) as possible. He could have set the story in 12th century England or 17th century Japan and told more or less the same story, but substituting certain situations for other ones. On top of that, we know the man loves to photograph blood, and has a very Catholic interest in the fragility of flesh (which he contrasts with the eternal strength of the soul, or spirit, call it what you will). I think it's a mistake to judge this movie by standards of history when there not even the slightest indication that Gibson intended anything but allegory/parable/myth.
As for the movie not telling us anything we didn't already know about violence, or the consequences of violence, or the mindset of sadists, etc., well, I can't really think of any movie ever made that told us anything we (collectively) didn't already know about Big Topic X, Y or Z. Movies exist to reinforce certain ideas, not to break news bulletins. The only variable -- and it's the reason for criticism, film history, and conversations en route to the parking lot -- is the choice of style and the narrative/thematic/ atmospheric details the filmmaker chooses to include and elaborate upon. The music, not the words.
As for the word "revelatory," I'll cheat a bit and reframe the discussion. Does a revelation necessarily have to be something you didn't know before? Often truths, or simple mundane facts, are revealed to us over and over again throughout our lives, even though theoretically we already knew them, even understood them on a deep level. I thought this movie was revelatory in that sense because it found new ways to express the emotional and physical reality of oppression, sadism, perserverance, faith and the motivating power of one's love for family. These are pretty basic concepts -- banal, I guess you could say -- but that's why we go to movies, or read novels or poems, or listen to pop songs, to hear them expressed again in fresh and exciting ways.
You're right that there's nothing new in "Apocalypto," message-wise. "Oppression is bad," "When you're mean to people, it makes them hate you, and it means you've lost some fundamental part of your own humanity," and so forth. But the lyrical force of Gibson's storytelling -- his high-tech primitivism, I guess you could call it -- made these ancient truths, or cliches, sink in again for me, and I loved that.
Or to put it a different way, why is it a strike against "Apocalypto" to say that it tells us the above things that we already knew, but on the other hand, it's OK for movies to tell us other, less grand and grave things that we already knew, like, "Falling in love is a fantastic feeling," or "Life's too short to waste time being unhappy," or -- from Peter Falk's monologue in "Wings of Desire" -- "To smoke, and have coffee - and if you do it together, it's fantastic."
OK, that wasn't so quick after all. But what the hell. Over to you.
"Movies exist to reinforce certain ideas, not to break news bulletins. The only variable -- and it's the reason for criticism, film history, and conversations en route to the parking lot -- is the choice of style and the narrative/thematic/ atmospheric details the filmmaker chooses to include and elaborate upon. The music, not the words."
Gotcha. And while I think Gibson's bluntly effective in that score, borrowing heavily from Mann and Deodato, I can't help but question the emotions inspired by that "music." When Paw looks at that moving bump on whatshername's stomach (and there I can't help but notice that the two leads are ruggedly handsome, whereas the villains have all the interesting physiognomy), it's like a rare moment in an endless symphony of leers and snarls and grimaces.
I was wondering if you believe that we as viewers should have higher standards in demanding historical accuracy? As someone with a generally positive outlook on the film, what would be your response to this reaction from a professor of Mayan culture? I find this sort of thing somewhat troubling, inspiring me to question my reaction to the film.
Hello, I just read a piece by Schickel on Gibson(in opinions section, not movies section, no less), and this reaction of "civilized" shock at "pornographic" violence in Gibson's movies is a little odd to me. I mean the critics who feel like this are often the champions of people who are themselves known for this kind of thing. Schickel loves Scorsese (I still think CASINO is the most violent movie I've ever seen), and Hoberman loves Cronenberg (I mean VIDEODROME? SCANNERS?). I mean Gibson fully deserves all the backlash on him for his actions but are the reactions of some critics really hold water with Gibson's movies themselves? I actually want to see APOCALYPTO now just to see how violent it is.
And one thing that's odd to me is the notion that Gibson gets off on showing violence, even though his heroes are often on the receiving end of punishments. And I don't think descriptions like sadomasochism really fit-I mean I think this (very modern) concept specifically has to do with sexual pleasure, and it takes thoroughly contemptuous eyes toward Gibson from the outset to get at that kind of "interpretation". I don't like Gibson for a lot of things but I sincerely don't think he made PASSION for a cynical reason or just to make money.
Personally though what I don't like about Gibson as a filmmaker is not the violence, or the so-called Neanderthal worldview but his "attitude".
I mean isn't suffering and transcendence and violence main concerns of the directors with some kind of Catholic background? (Hitchcock? Scorsese? John Woo? Or dare I say it snobs, Robert Bresson??) And isn't the violent "Catholic" sort of imagery so prevalent in science fiction movies already? Mad Max movies? Alien movies? Robocop 1? Terminator1? Why act so shocked???
(And ironically enough, I remember some critic compared Braveheart contemptuously to Monty Python and the Holy Grail- because of all the head and limb choppings-which people seem to think is making fun of Bresson's Lancelot of the Lake)
But Gibson seems to be the kind of self-righteous guy who wants to go out of his ways to pick fights with people (no wonder people go out of their ways to pick fights with him)-why accentuate deliberately the touchy aspects of the gospels, etc.?
And that said I think a movie like Braveheart is pretty remarkable-you can scoff it's cornball, and it has obnoxious aspects but this movie trumps the likes of Gladiator, Troy, Alexander, Kingdom of Heaven, and Last Samurai so badly, and I think this movie gained popularity over the years purely through word of mouth. Maybe it's too late for Gibson but if you like him as a director, you would hope he goes easy on the martyr complex and try something different.
"I don't think it's faint praise at all to say that Gibson is, first and foremost, an action filmmaker, in that he's literally most interested in what people do, and how they feel as they're doing it, and how their bodies (and spirits, to go cosmic, why not?) move through space, and seems predisposed to keep viewers in a kind of boundless present tense. He seems possessed; he's a terrifying filmmaker in a lot of ways, not just because of his technical facility (whether the movies are heavily storyboarded, as "Braveheart" and "The Passion" were, or a mix of storyboarded and caught-on-the-fly, psuedo-documentary moments, as is the case with "Apocalypto") but because his sensibility is so blunt, so frankly base, in that it forces audiences to acknowledge humankind's animal nature, the sweat and blood and other fluids, the nonrational drives that impel both individual decisions and mass hysteria (his last three films all contain sections that are among the best arguments against getting wrapped up in community sentiment every committed to the big screen). "
What you said, Matt.
What differentiates Gibson, for me, from purveyors of "torture porn", is that the violence of the image isn't merely basely purient, but it serves, as I've said above, as a correlative for his own spiritual journey, if you will. Yeah, sure, it's still pretty raw stuff, possibly excessive, and not without an element of martyrdom, but Gibson is so deeply inside these images (rather than taking a classically auteurist approach and directing from the outside in) that they become part of his own narrative as an artist and a man. And really, is what we are shown in Apocalypto any more "shocking" than Pasolini's Salo?
Sure, Gibson's pulpy, trashy, crude, but any more so than certain "auteurs", possessed of a seamy side, who are revered around here and elsewhere. I'm not arguing for masterpiece status, here, don't misunderstand. But I admire him for the risks he takes as an artist, in spite of obvious shortcomings. But bear in mind Robert Browning, "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?"
dedicated reader: I think the historical accuracy issue is a red herring, as it nearly always is in visionary allegorical action movies like this one. John Ford's "Young Mr. Lincoln" is historically laughable, too, but it's still a great movie. Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies are often loosely inspired by real events, but they're useless as history, except as a reflection of certain attitudes of that time and place (and even there, they're not much help, because Shakepeare was more advanced in his understanding of the relationship between races, sexes and people of different religious backgrounds than almost anyone who attended his plays). These are myths and entertainments, not historical texts, and were always intended as the former. If you don't like "Apocalypto," no amount of historical accuracy is going to sway you, and if you do like it, what's more historical accuracy going to do, add five percent to your liking it?
That said, Mann's "Mohicans," from which "Apocalypto" liberally, even blatantly borrows, is much more historically plugged-in, and offers the most complicated portrait of British/ colonial/ Mohican/ Huron/ French relations ever seen onscreen -- if in fact any movie has ever previously bothered showing all those facets of that time. That's one of many reasons I think it's the greater, and certainly more perfect, movie of the two. That and the fact that the violent acts depicted in "Mohicans" are no less extreme, but presented with just the right combination of horrific ugliness and elegant restraint.
Mark: Schickel's very inconsistent in his attitude toward screen violence, and that inconsistency manifests itself here. Schickel was an influence on me as a writer -- his and Corliss' reviews in TIME were my gateway to a lot of good movies and to other critics -- but this particular article is specious at best, opportunistic at worst. It's hard to say what's most irritating about it.
First off is the presumption of consensus. He acts as if everybody hates the movie, and specifically hates it on the basis of the violence, when in fact it's gotten some overall positive and enthusiastic but mixed reviews across the board, and the portrayal of violence has been a springboard for some interesting discussions on this blog and elsewhere.
The second irritant is him describing the violence as "psychosexual," which is also designed to push buttons, as it presumes that any film with a sensual style (Gibson, in this case, or somebody like De Palma or Park Chan-Wook) is saying that violence is sexually exciting; in fact all such films are doing is acknowledging the visceral appeal of the body, and damage to the body, while complicating our reaction to that imagery and making us question what we're feeling and why we're feeling it and whether it's a good thing (that's what art is supposed to do, no?).
There's a cheap Puritanism in the description of Gibson's violence as sadomasochistic or psychosexual; it presumes that whoever's reading the piece will agree with the author's implicit conviction that there's nothing beautiful or attractive about screen violence per se, that it's somehow improper to investigate the fact that those attractions exist and have always existed, and that if you don't dismiss such a filmmaker as unserious from the get-go, you're just a sick fuck who gets off on bloodshed. There's a huge difference between Gibson's portrayal of violence (whether the more tragic and realistic type in the first half of "Apocalypto" or the stylized, mythologized type shown in the second half) and the bludgeoning, nasty, glossy, mindlessly aestheticized violence shown in, say, a Tony Scott or Adrian Lyne movie.
I love when critics provoke me, but I hate it when they take rhetorical shortcuts to win their argument, or worse, assume the argument has already been won, and that anyone inclined to disagree with their wisdom is an idiot who's not even entitled to evidence or elaboration.
For example, when Schickel expresses dismay that "The Passion of the Christ" was a big hit, that it was an inexplicable phenomenon. I thought it was a troublesome an d hugely flawed but in many ways great movie, and powerful; it made me want to go back to church, and considering I've lived most of my adult life on the agonistic to athiest end of the spectrum, that's a huge compliment to Gibson. If people who loved it are yahoos -- as Schickel's dismissal seems to indicate they are -- then I might as well have the word emblazoned on a t-shirt and wear it to screenings.
As someone who has attempted to watch Braveheart and Passion only on DVD but could barely get past the first act because I felt fairly molested by Gibson's Classics Illustrated storytelling style... your review gives me pause. Maybe I need to see his stuff in the theater. I'll definitely have to catch Apocalypto on the big screen this awards season.
I remember being knocked out by DEAD CALM, TITANIC and the KILL BILLs in the theater during their respective initial runs but later finding them kind of dumb and transparent in home viewing. Those films overpowered all quibbling about logic and motivation on the big screen. Hitchcock told Truffaut, "Fill the screen with meaning." These flicks fill the screen with emotion and sensation, which can be thrilling. But that aftertaste, the feeling of having just screamed your lungs out at a stupid pop concert, always helps me put such films in a lesser category. The great ones have "meaning" that can't fit comfortably on a post-it. Why use such a huge screen as merely an arresting a bumper sticker?
I'll shut it for now til I get to see Apocalpyto.
kj: "Sure, Gibson's pulpy, trashy, crude, but any more so than certain "auteurs", possessed of a seamy side, who are revered around here and elsewhere. I'm not arguing for masterpiece status, here, don't misunderstand. But I admire him for the risks he takes as an artist, in spite of obvious shortcomings. But bear in mind Robert Browning, 'A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?'"
Right on. Part of what troubles Gibson's detractors is his baseness, his common touch. He's making folk art for multiplexes. There's tremendous technical sophistication, and a deep awareness of movie history, but it's in the service of primal stories about the basics of life, and to make matters worse, there's little of the self-reflexivity, the postmodern, often smirky acknowledgement of cinema's past, that is the hallmark of directors who are just as violent but get a much more sympathetic reception from critics. Gibson's done his homework, but he's not interested in showing you his notes; he just applies what he learned to movies that he, personally, wants to see. His imagination is a scary and problematic place, but he seems very honest in how he explores it.
I think what we're really getting down to here is what kind of violence is your cup of tea. And I would argue that there is nothing in THE WILD BUNCH or SCHINDLER'S LIST that is as graphic as what I've heard about these scenes of faces being ripped off and beating hearts being held up. I'm not saying scenes in those other movies aren't as horrific, but they do use the violence to express something about our nature. (And you're absolutely right that we don't have to be told something new about violence in every film. That's a very good observation, as was your point on the history. I'll buy your argument there.) I think we all enjoy violent movies and each of us has our own particular squeamish meter. I couldn't abide HANNIBAL and thoroughly enjoyed THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. It was the approach, the way it was showed. For what it's worth, I love Gibson's PAYBACK, but don't take the violence there seriously. But I remember being disturbed by the quartering in BRAVEHEART. I think what I keep focusing on is this notion that there is something about Gibson's focus on the violence, the way he presents it, the way he sees violence as a commentary on something, that is different than some of these other filmmakers. Is that true in your view of the film, Matt? And is that a valid criticism on which to judge the movie?
THR-HB: That's certainly a valid point of view from which to judge a movie. But I think here were are getting into the "cup of tea" phenomenon. I don't see anything wrong with very graphic violence as long as there's an artistic, philosophical or political sensibility behind showing it -- a reason for showing it that way. I think Gibson has a lot of reasons that have been mentioned in this thread, everything from his radical Roman Catholicism (which partly accounts for his comfort level in portraying graphic bloodletting, torture and suffering) to his Canterbury Tales sense of physical reality (that we're closer to animals than we think, both emotionally and physically -- that we're spirits wrapped in fragile flesh, thus the fixation on showing us just how fragile that flesh is).
Given how violent Gibson's last three movies were, I feel odd pointing out that he does, in fact, exercise his own kind of restraint. When William Wallace is being stretched on the rack and then hung in "Braveheart," Gibson shows us his body full-frame and his face in closeup, but when he's disemboweled, he never shows you the knife entering flesh; he shows the hero's reaction, the crowd's reaction, and then cuts to a performing midget in the crowd playing with a length of sausage (which is more hideous than actually showing the intestines coming out, in my opinion). There are a few such moments in "TPOTC" and "Apocalypto" -- he shows the heart being held up, but not the knife entering the torso, unless I'm blocking something out. But these are exceptions, I'll grant you. In "The Passion" he errs on the side of the graphic because that's the entire point of the movie -- to amp up the idea that Christ was a savior who paid the price for his beliefs by having his body systematically destroyed, and transcended that destruction. And "Apocalypto" is all about the fragility of a way of life, and of (individual) human life itself. The fragility of flesh in "Apocalypto" ties in with the fleeting nature of happiness, which is easily destroyed by huge forces beyond any one person's control, from the arrival of the sacrifice cult to the big reveal at the end, which reminds me of that "Phantom Menace" line, "There's always a bigger fish." There are several points in "Apocalypto" where adversaries of one sort of another cease fighting when confronted with a threat larger than either of them. That's purposeful and meaningful, I think, and it goes a long way towards indicating that Gibson isn't just throwing buckets of blood at the screen -- that he has a vision. A very basic vision, but a vision.
Does Schickel really really think that The Passion's "gazillion-dollar success" happened because it is an extravagant "form of pornography"?
That is insulting and dumb.
Plus, he's just plain wrong about the critical community's universal cry of "Yuck" in response to Apocalypto. Unless, of course, he's hand-picking his own private critical community, which would also be insulting and dumb.
Do you know that all this time I thought TPOTC was The Pirates of the Caribbean?
Going to take my "Duh!" pills now.
I believe the quote at the beginning was attributed to Will Durant.
Anon: Right-o. Now corrected.
I know I beat up on Anthony Lane a lot, but sometimes he dazzles me. His "Apocalypto" review is cursory, aloof and bemused (his norm). But his final paragraph, though wary of Gibson, makes some marvelous observations:
"'Apocalypto' is a pathological work of art. It is neither gratuitous nor casual; Gibson is not trying out an idea or testing a visual manner, and the digital cameras used throughout by the director of photography, Dean Semler, yield both a lustre and a pantherish mobility that reach to the guts of the story. That is the thing about Gibson, fool that he is in other ways: he has learned how to tell a tale, and to raise a pulse in the telling. You have to admire that basic gift, uncommon as it is in Hollywood these days, though equally you have to ask what obsessions goad it on. Contrary to what his detractors say, I don’t believe Gibson is roused by violence in itself. What lures him, in his dark remoldings of Catholic iconography, is breakage and restoration—the deeper and more foul the wounds, the more pressing the need to see them healed. Hence the multiple endings of 'Apocalypto,' at once overpowering and risible, and hence the blessing that one of the murderous hunters bestows on a friend whose life, cut short by a snakebite to the neck, is quickly draining away: 'Travel well.'”
The full review is here.
Wow, Matt. Thanks for the Anthony Lane contribution. I beat up on him regularly too, but once in a while . . . it's like he stops being Anthony Lane for a moment and speaks from the heart.
Vision? I don't know; I just don't feel there's enough interesting ideas in what Gibson's doing to call it a vision. Cronenberg has a vision, Peckinpah, sure, Pasolini in Salo, to name an extreme example. This is, as pointed out, multiplex fare, and very commercial.
No, I don't think Gibson's being cynical about his filmmaking, he is sincere. But the marketing of Passion was cynical in extreme, the way it pandered to Christian conservatives, attacked everyone who questioned it (what did he say about Frank Rich? It was a very Gibsonesque remark) all the way to asking approval from a pope he felt nothing but contempt for (to his credit, the pope withheld it).
Critics have been calling historical accuracy a red herring recently, and I question that; we can do a fantasy clearly based on fantasy, but what if the fantasy slanders an entire culture? Does Gibson think he can put that about the Mayan civilization onscreen and no Mayan would protest? I think he's wrong.
In response to Steven Boone's comment, I really don't think that movies like the one you describe can automatically described as somehow inferior. It takes a certain amount of skill and talent to create a film that can engage your emotions on that level. Hitchcock did say fill the screen with meaning but I get the feeling that he interpreted that statement in a slightly different way from you. In reading that interview I got the sense that he was talking about visual connections (eg. bread knife left absently on a counter for later unintended use). The whole 'show, don't tell' thing. I don't quite believe he was talking about logical and thematic depth. In fact, many of his greatest movies are exercises in engaging the audience's thrillseek gland while they suspend all logic and disbelief. He's the master of carrying along his viewers in a story that would fall apart on later consideration. I wouldnt put down 'pop' entertainment (the concerts you dismiss or the movies you mention) as automatically inferior. It's just a different sort of achievement from crafting a more intellectual piece of art. But, given that they do engage your emotions on a pretty primal level, they are achievements nonetheless.
I'm not saying Gibson's movies are great. Hell, I'm not even talking about Gibson's movies. I just take issue with categorizing 'pop' art as automatically less worthy of consideration or admiration.
Actually I saw the film last night (yes I had to give Mel Gibson my money)-and Matt is right about the disparity in the two halves. The beginning felt far more violent, though it actually shows less, and the latter part's gore was really just standard-action movie stuff to me. I think you can be shocked at the immediacy of the atrocities in the beginning, but not the action movie tropes in the latter part (or even the sacrifice scenes) if you've been to the movies the last twenty years. Well, I can't deny that it affected me (and action stuff was really well done) but I want to digest it a little bit.
And I have no problem with the people who were offended by the movie in terms of its portrayals of Mayans, or history, because to me the movie had no real reason to be set in that culture-it could have been a Greek myth for all I care, and when you want to come up with an ancient culture that was fraught with decadence and environmental destruction and so on the first culture that comes to mind is not the Mayans(but that could be just my ignorance about history). I was a little puzzled by the arrival of the Spanish at the end too-but I think the idea that Gibson meant them as the saviors to the "savages" seems a little strong to me. I mean Jaguar Paw does not go to the Europeans at the end, and seeks "a new beginning" in the forest. And I really don't think Gibson holds the characters in contempt because they aren't Europeans, considering that Jaguar Paw's father's death is (almost deliberately) identical to Murron's death in Braveheart.
Does the movie have a vision? Well this is another one of Gibson's bloody martyr tales, and one can certainly say it's simplistic. Personally, having a kind of sincerity about one's characters is more important to me than how complex one's vision is. To me, Raging Bull and Mean Streets are sincere, whereas Cape Fear and Casino aren't. Robocop 1 is sincere, Starship Troopers isn't. Of course, this seems just arbitrary but I felt that you can't laugh at the brutalities in Raging Bull, Mean Streets, and Robocop whereas in other movies certain things were shown just because you can.
I mean Cronenberg surely has a vision-a very modern where the body is completely freed from the spirit say-but personally I feel that he's very removed from his characters as opposed to the ideas they represent, say. I want to compare Cronenberg to Kubrick, a similarly very cold, clinical, atheistic, etc. director. Kubrick is a director I hold in highest respect, and I don't care for Cronenberg, not just in terms of filmmaking skills, snob factor (though Cronenberg is a snob favorite now), and stuffs like that but because I think Kubrick finds his characters like Barry Lyndon genuinely tragic, no matter how limited Kubrick thinks he and the humanity are, whereas Cronenberg, to me, generally doesn't believe in his characters (well, one can make a case here and there, in Fly, for one) and does something nasty just because he can.
yo Abhimanyu,
You said, "I wouldnt put down 'pop' entertainment (the concerts you dismiss or the movies you mention) as automatically inferior."
I wouldn't, either. I try not to give any work an automatic anything. The TITANICs and ARMAGEDDONs of the world get 2nd class treatment because they're dumb. Pop spectacle that works for me is more along the lines of ROBOCOP, DARKMAN, CROUCHING TIGER, the middle sections of the first two MATRIXes (or is that Matrices?).
On reflection, lemme pull DEAD CALM and KILL BILL out of my "dummy" list. And I'll retract the "logic and motivation" qualifier. What draws the line for me is not whether the flicks are script smart, but whether they are picture smart. Are these comic book panels thrown together with some kind of guiding intelligence, some sense of how the audience is taking them in, second-by-second? With guys like Mel, TITANIC Cameron, Michael Bay and NATURAL BORN KILLERS Stone I get the sensation of a lover who never takes the time to lick, just sticks. And we're sitting there in the audience dry and astonished, feeling something intense but ultimately hollow and painful.
Hitchcock always licked. SHADOW OF A DOUBT. REAR WINDOW. Great pop filmmaking is a seduction.
"the saviors to the "savages" seems a little strong to me"
Their arrival is ominous, sure. But after all the nonstop savagery we've seen without the magnificence, can we not think of them as a better alternative?
I like steven's list: Robocop and Darkman had their share of gruesomeness (from the makers of The Fourth Man and Evil Dead 2?), but the hatefulness never seemd directed at some minority group or the other. Plus I think they're wittier and more talented than Gibson, but that's differing cups of tea, I suppose.
For more on "Apocalypto," plus scattered musings on "Blood Diamond," "The Holiday" and a vigorous back-and-forth on "The Departed," see this week's edition of "Navel Gazing with Sean Burns and Andrew Dignan."
Matt wrote: "He could have set the story in 12th century England or 17th century Japan and told more or less the same story, but substituting certain situations for other ones."
Which was funny because after seeing it I felt like he HAD done that movie before....in 13th century scotland and 18th century colonial america (though I realize he didn't "do" this movie).
Really bad dudes make very clear you should REALLY dislike them and kill someone from the heros family. Fight for revenge using heros general bad-assedness. Movie ends with hero not necessarily victorious, but with the viewer knowing the bad guys are going to get theirs.
Ben: I can't deny that you're right. Gibson recycles plots and situations. But if that in and of itself was a crime, John Ford, Hitchcock and Scorsese would all have been sent to movie jail. It's what you do with it that counts, and I think Gibson (as star/creative tone-setter, and more recently, as director) is to macho action melodrama as Charles Bukowski is to the getting drunk/getting laid/losing all my money gambling strain of contemporary fiction: a one trick pony, but it's a good trick.
"The Passion" is his most heartfelt, violent, problematic and surprising movie, and for that reason, his most divisive.
Very late to the party, but thought you chaps might find this essay interesting:
Now, no doubt my experience was negatively affected by knowing a little more about Mayan culture than the average American moviegoer who is Gibson's audience. But you don't have to know much about the Mayans to realize that what ensues in Apocalypto just doesn't make any sense, even within the context of its own self-created world.
The most obvious example comes in the movie's central set piece: the sacrifice scene atop the temple in the Mayans' stone city. Just as Jaguar Paw is about to have his heart cut out on the altar atop the temple stairs, a total eclipse of the sun occurs, driving the populace below into a confused frenzy. The priests declare the gods satisfied, and let Jaguar Paw and his fellow captives off the hook, so to speak.
Huh? OK, nevermind the fact that Mayans not only regularly predicted astronomical events, they actually designed their temples and cities and religious ceremonies around such events as solstices and eclipses. Nevermind that they would have been eagerly anticipating any such eclipse.
from here: Orcinus
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