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APOCALYPTO Send This Review to a Friend
There’s no doubt that director Mel Gibson knows how to put violent action on screen to maximum effect. Give him that. But his “Apocalpyto” offers little else but especially brutal violence, almost non-stop, showing man’s inhumanity with virtually nothing to justify the package. In depicting the Mayan civilization he concentrates only on its cruelty. What passes for an idea in the film occurs at the end when the foreign ships arrive, implying a set of conquerors who will dish out new violence to replace the old. At least we don’t have to sit through that phase.
Gibson has gone to great lengths to strive for authenticity. He has used Mayan dialects and subtitles. He has tried to get his actors to look real with their physicality, ornaments and war paint. But at times they nonetheless look ridiculous, like a set of caricatures escaping from a bad Hollywood jungle movie. There is little humor in this film, other than of the schoolboy sort at the outset when one of the men, the butt of practical joking, is advised to apply a certain leaf to his privates to enable him to become fertile. It produces terrible pain to much laughter by the others.
Gibson asks you to sit through cruelty after cruelty as one tribe slaughters villagers, taking some as slaves for ambitious building projects and using others for sacrifices to the gods. The story, such as it is, involves one man’s efforts to survive and rescue his family, and the efforts of everyone to live through lurking death at every turn.
I won’t chronicle here all of the barbarity unleashed in this film. Imagine the worst. Sure, one can make the jump and cite present day atrocities and credit Gibson for making the point by tracing back to earlier oppressiveness and slaughter. But do we need two hours and eighteen minutes of this to enlighten us? The only ones I can recommend this film to are sadists and masochists. A Touchstone Pictures release.
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