Mel Gibson's action-adventure about the waning days of the Mayan civilization stars unknowns and is entirely subtitled, yet it's surprisingly accessible. It's also a failure as anything more than an action film.
Gibson opens with a heady quote from philosopher William Durant—"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within"—but thankfully disposes with pretension thereafter, offering instead an occasionally entertaining but frequently maddening tour of Mayan society from the worms-eye view of some unfortunate jungle-dwellers on their way to a sacrificial altar."
Beautifully and vividly photographed as this historical "epic" may be, it centers on characters who have no more idea of what's going on than the audience. You'll leave Apocalypto knowing little more about Mayan culture than you did already.
If Gibson has a point—in interviews he's mentioned something about the Iraq war—it has been obscured to the point of meaninglessness and is frequently ignored in favor of galling the audience. What remains is an onslaught of breathless, extremely gory fight and chase scenes that would, on their own, constitute either an hour or so of a gripping, unnerving film or one heinously bad dream.
Apocalypto isn't forgotten quite so easily as your average nightmare, but there isn't much in it worth remembering, either.
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For the first 85 minutes, we along with the captives are dragged into a world of chaos and confusion on this frightening, arduous journey. The freshness of this world, nothing like it having appeared on film before, captures our imagination. Then, suddenly, thanks to divine intervention by solar eclipse, Jaguar Paw escapes his captors.
The movie turns into a much more conventional chase movie with Zero Wolf and his gang racing through the jungle to hunt down and kill Jaguar Paw. Yet the deeper the chase goes into the rain forest, the more the home court advantage swings to our hero. Soon we have a reverse "Deliverance," where the hillbilly is the good guy and every dreadful fate that befalls his pursuers gets cheers from the popcorn crowd.
Like "Passion," Gibson feels -- and he may be right here -- that ancient languages transport audiences into another time and place. The script has been translated into the Mayan dialect spoken in the Yucatan peninsula today. So the movie comes to us in subtitles, my favorite one being "He's fucked."
Often, though, the movie feels like an illustrated lecture without the lecture. We witness all sorts of strange cultural and natural phenomena without having a clue as to their meanings. Why does the rain forest tribe have no defense system? What do the tattoos, headpieces and jewelry mean? Why are sacrificial victims painted blue? It's nice to know that there are few university professors who actually understand this movie.
What's really puzzling is that everyone seems to speak the same language, meaning that enough travel and trade exist so our remote village would certainly be aware of the barbarity of the capital city and its roving warriors. So why does everything that happens to them come as a surprise?
Gibson's crew is exemplary in creating this lost world. Cinematographer Dean Semler, shooting digitally with Panavision's new high-definition Genesis camera system, seemingly can get his graceful, fluid camera into just about any place in that rain forest, which he fills with dazzling light. Designer Tom Sanders' constructions convey us into a world of terrifying oddness and savagery. James Horner's score mingles weird, primordial notes with vague Latin sounds and even Sufi music by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
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