Whoops Apocalypto

You might not want to have a drink with him but Mel Gibson can make movies and deserves to be judged on that fact alone.

He opens his new film Apocalypto with a tapir hunt; a silent squad of Mayan villagers racing through familiar jungle, chasing their quarry through the thick foliage in what will prove to be an eerie foresight of the relentless chase to come. These men are members of a small settlement; a happy, peaceful place, well fed by the jungle and an idyll of home and family. The wider Mayan society however, is under threat from the twin perils of drought and disease. In the city, the temple priests believe only a massive human sacrifice will appease the gods and return the land to prosperity. To supply victims, they have charged a warrior leader (the brilliant Israel Contreras) and his gang of foot soldiers (led by the sadistic Ramirez Amilcar) to take men from the jungle villages surrounding the city and bring them to the top of the steeply stepped pyramids to meet their end.

Gibson tells the story of this aspect of the civilisation through the eyes of a single young man, Jaguar Paw (played with honesty and conviction by newcomer Rudy Youngblood), who lives happily with his wife, son and father. After the mercenaries arrive and destroy the village, Jaguar Paw is taken to the city, where he must escape his fate, and return to save his wife (Dalia Hernandez) and child, hidden down a well.

Like in his previous effort, Gibson tells the film in an ancient language, the Mayan dialect of Yucatec. There are straightforward subtitled translations of the minimal spoken dialogue, with one or two moments of storytelling and exposition cleverly extended for maximum impact. The plot is thin enough, a separation caused by war and a chasing return to hearth and home, but Gibson, wearing the influences of Terrence Malick as a badge of honour, fills it out with the constant distractions of astonishing sets, costumes and a constant succession of brutal action sequences, that makes it epic. It is an occasionally awesome spectacle, stomach-churning and heart-stopping and flawlessly played by a mostly amateur native cast. The eventual manhunt through the jungle, over waterfalls and back towards the hunting grounds is as exhilarating a sequence as anything in Braveheart, reminiscent of the giddy thrills of the similarly apocalyptic Mad Max. Gibson, who directs with tremendous fluency, has created a viable, convincing world and peopled it with a well-chosen cast.

The film opens with a quote from the American historian William Durant; “a great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within”, a statement, not originally applied to the Mayan, that Gibson appropriates to complete his thesis; that the Mayan’s religious devotion to death would have doomed them regardless of whether the conquistadores arrived to colonise and conquer. From then on, he uses this one man’s desperate, extraordinarily committed, efforts to save himself and his family as a metaphor for the need to save Western civilisation from its own self-destructive instincts.

This is an extremely violent film, red in tooth and claw as almost all of Gibson’s pictures have been – easily a match for Passion of the Christ in its mortification of the flesh and commitment to gory realism. There are decapitations, gruesome disembowelments and realistic representations of war that will disgust some viewers, but somehow, for all its excess, the violence works within the story. It’s at the top of the pyramid that the film takes its first significant misstep, with an unutterably coincidental act of nature creating an enormous credibility gap with Gibson then piling on the endings, scratching the rules of standard-issue Hollywood cinema all over his naturalistic setting and convincing performances. It’s a minor shame, not helped by a climactic scene that makes you wonder if Mel hasn’t misread the dates in his history books. Regardless of these few narrative errors, and regardless of what your opinion of the director is, this film is an extraordinary achievement.