Mel Gibson's APOCALYPTO

Mel Gibson's fourth cinematic outing as director, and his third historial epic to date, is set in Mesoamerica in the 16th Century, and was filmed on location in Mexico.

As with his fact-twisting Braveheart (1995) Apocalypto concerns itself with an honourable man struggling against almost overwhelming odds. In this instance, instead of an idealised William Wallace fighting the forces of a rapacious England, our hero is a jungle-dwelling hunter, and the enemy is the once-great Mayan Empire.

As an aside, I think it's fair to say at this point that we can now clearly see a common theme uniting the four testosterone-soaked feature films Gibson has directed to date, namely the individual's struggle against the forces of injustice and bigotry that have been brought to bear against him. This theme was present in The Man Without A Face (1993) his directorial debut, and it was certainly the key element of his fundo-porno splatter epic The Passion of the Christ (2004).

Given Mel's well-documented, ultra-conservative religious beliefs, which includes a conviction that contemporary Catholicism is heretical, I wonder if Gibson sees himself in the same heroic light as his leading characters; as a lone defender of the true faith struggling to bring light to a sinful world? It's preferable to viewing yourself as a drunken bigot, I guess...

Such thoughts aside, and returning to Apocalypto, which has already been criticised for insulting Mayan civilisation, the first part of this very-traditionally structured three-act drama explores the idyllic lives of a group of jungle-dwelling hunters. Among them is our hero, the young warrior Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood, pictured below with Morris Birdyellowhead as his father, Flint Sky) whose wife Seven (Dalia Hernandez) is pregnant with their second child. Gibson is at pains to show that the tribesfolk not only live in harmony with their world (shades of the noble savage) but are just like you and me despite running around half-naked. Gosh, they even joke about their mothers-in-law! In short, it's all tapir-hunting, practical jokes and storytelling around the fire, with little to really engage or entertain the viewer - until the arrival of a group of terrified foreigners, fleeing their own lands in search of a new beginning, heralds the coming storm.

Hot on their heels are a troupe of bloodthirsty Mayan warriors, led by the imposing Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo) and his ludicrously sadistic sidekick Snake Ink (Rodolfo Palacios, who lacks only a top hat, cape and waxed moustache to complete his transformation into the most two-dimensional villain seen on screen since the equally two-dimensional Romans responsible for flogging Jesus in The Passion of the Christ). As invaders are wont to do, the Mayans butcher half the tribe and enslave the rest, although Jaguar Paw manages to save his wife and child by concealing them in a dry well, where they hide for most of the rest of the film.

Following a forced march through strange lands, where we glimpse slave gangs labouring and dying, fruits rotting in the fields, and the victims of plague alternately shrieking, laughing insanely or prophecying doom, the imprisoned villagers and their captors arrive at their destination: the Mayan city. In this place of barbaric splendour and exquisitely detailed although historically inaccurate production design, the surviving women are sold into slavery, while Jaguar Paw and his fellow tribesmen are led high atop a stepped pyramid, destined to have their still-beating hearts ripped out as a sacrifice to the Mayan gods.

Naturally there wouldn't be much of a movie left if that was the fate that befell our hero, and so of course Jaguar Paw escapes, fleeing back through the jungle in a desperate attempt to save his wife before his pursuers can recapture him and flay him alive.

It's only in this third and final act that Gibson brings any real energy to Apocalypto, jetisoning the trite and expository dialogue that the actors have had to deliver up to this point in favour of a dynamic, extended action sequence lasting well over a half-hour. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most cliche-riddled sections of the film, featuring pretty much every trope you'd expect to see from a cinematic chase through a tropical jungle, akin to a 1950's Tarzan movie except with better cinematography and no Johnny Weissmuller. Slow motion jump over a waterfall? Check. How about quicksand? Yep, that too. Wounded man whose dripping blood betrays his location to his pursuers as he hides in the jungle canopy ? Of course!

Although all the dialogue in Apocalypto is delivered in the Yukatek Maya language and subtitled in English; despite the fact that there's not a European face to be seen for 99.9% of the film; this is a quintessentially Hollywood film. It's manipulative, predictable and constructed from cliche upon cliche. This is the cinema of spectacle, berefit of character development and narrative arcs, and with nothing but contempt for its audience's intelligence. Instead of providing his audience with a visceral and engaging insight into an lost culture, all Gibson has done is cement his reputation as a sadist most at home working in lowest common denominator entertainment.

As with The Passion of the Christ, Mel demonstrates here that he doesn't know the meaning of the words restraint and subtlety. His messages - paganism is bad! pride comes before a fall! - are hammered home with the same gusto with which he stages an endless parade of butchery and bloodshed in almost every scene of the film. It's a telling sign of how lacking in original vision Gibson is that even his gusto for gore fails to find new methods of expression, leaving the viewer with the overwhelming impression that for all its slickly photographed carnage, Apocalypto is ultimately derivative and uninspired.

The writer-director also shows that he won't let historical accuracy get in the way of his clumsy political allegory about the decline of a nation-state, which simultaneously serves as a piece of pro-Christian propaganda. The beautifully realised sets and costumes meld together disparate elements of several Mesoamerican cultures, while Gibson's dramatic device of a solar eclipse at a key point in the film conveniently ignores the fact that the Maya were excellent astronomers, with a well-grounded knowledge of when and where such events would occur.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Gibson seems to have conciously chosen to portray the Maya as decadent, bloodthirsty and on the verge of societal collapse. This not only misrepresents the historical truth to a significant degree; it implicitly suggests that the devastation and genocide wreaked by Spain's conquistadors in Central and South America was somehow a just punishment for the Mayan Empire's evil and heathen ways; a belief that I find far more sickening than any of the film's gratuitous, endless violence.

Mel Gibson has described Apocalypto as an attempt to provide "people who really want to be taken somewhere else ... with a visceral and sense [sic] experience, so that by the time they walk into the temple (in the film's sacrifice scene) they are hopefully going out of their minds."

Out of their minds with boredom or nausea, possibly.

One and half still-beating human hearts out of five.