Review — Apocalypto

As Neil likes to say, Mel Gibson directs good movies. Unlike Kevin Costner, he doesn’t try to make himself the hero of an epic tale of love / disaster / triumphing over insurmountable odds. Neil wanted to watch this in the cinema, and I agreed it would probably be a great big-screen outing, but time got away from us and we never got round to it. So when we saw it on sale at Asda, Neil snapped it up.

So, basically, Apocalypto is a movie about a Mayan villager, Jaguar Paw, who sees his village destroyed by ‘big city’ Mayans. They take him (and loads of others) prisoner. They march them — tied — to their city, to face a horrible fate. Jaguar Paw manages to survive and escape (more on this later), driven only by the desire to save his pregnant wife and child.

(This is all on the back of the DVD cover, so none of what I’ve said is a spoiler. But spoilers are below the fold.)

I think Mel Gibson’s earlier outing, the Jesus one, set a precedent. Apocalypto was good, but not extremely good. However, I did like the message under it all (I may be over-reading it) — the signs of a civilisation declining (even without the arrival of the Spaniards) are most obvious when there is rampant inhumanity to man, especially when it comes to cruelty to those of the same ethnic group.

Which is probably more of an indicator of my own pessimism and despair at the society in which I now live, but whatever.

What got me was Jaguar Paw’s extreme good luck (well, kinda). He may have been captured and pretty much tortured, having to watch his father be executed and all that, but when it was his turn to die, he cheated it four times — once with the solar eclipse (which was also extremely convenient for the shaman), the second time when he was shot with an arrow, but managed to turn the obsidian dagger around to kill the main baddie’s son (but his lumbering friend died quite horribly), thirdly when the bad Mayans were intercepted by the jaguar, and lastly, on the beach when they spotted the ships for the first time. I’m not sure if the message there was that it’s all down to luck, people, nothing more.

I wasn’t entirely sure what the hell the kid with boils on her face was there for, it just seemed a bit of a laboured attempt to be all mystical with the prophecy. Also, given the language spoken was Yucatec Maya, has it remained unchanged, or are we taking a little artistic licence here? I’m sure we can forgive our writers and directors for this possible inaccuracy, it was just interesting to think about.

• 13 Nov 2007

• Thinking