News-Letter

There is no crucifixion in Apocalypto. And, despite the ardent wishes of publicist stunt junkies, Mel Gibson does not make an appearance. Oh, and he never mentions God. At least not a monotheistic one.

Instead he makes a movie that can be cut in half. The first hour
is an epic -- long shots of the jungle canopy, bombastic music,
overwhelming prettiness in each shot -- and the second hour is a music
video without a pop song -- frenetic, sped-up-then-slowed-down action
that makes all those pretty scenes blur into adrenaline.

The plot, sketched out by Gibson and a studio pal, is
formulaic -- Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), husband from a peaceful
tribe, is taken from his wife and child by the domineering Maya and
must fight to reunite with them -- and Gibson seems to know it, as
instead of characters we have images. His cinematographer Dean Semler,
an Oscar-winner for Dances With Wolves, makes ample use of his
vast jungle canvas, creating atmosphere and emotion where the script
falls flat by seamlessly blending actor and scenery -- the hunters of
Jaguar Paw's tribe, some indigenous actors, some not, inhabit their
landscape with a grace due entirely to Semler's portrait-quality shots.
The images truly come into their own when the captured Jaguar Paw,
strung together with his fellow villagers by a raiding party, are
marched into the center of a Mayan city, where the sheer color, energy
and light call to mind the studio epics of a time when Hollywood
regularly hired thousands of extras a day, as in films like Lawrence of Arabia or even Cleopatra.
News reports say that Gibson did the same, hiring upward of 1,000
extras for some of the Mayan scenes, and the results are refreshingly
free of computer animation, as 1,000 or more real, living people go
about their business on screen -- people who, in scenes that remind you
that the past is never dead, look stunningly like the paintings and
sculptures that remain from the Mayan period.

Gibson's Goya-esque inability to turn away from the seductive
blossoming of crimson blood or slithery organs or wet, snapping bones
-- the same lack of restraint that made some irreverent critics call The Passion a
religious snuff film -- serves him well here in the pre-Colombian world
of the jungles surrounding what is today Veracruz in coastal Mexico.
Though the spurting, slopping, sluicing and shunting of blood and fluid
becomes almost too much -- and then continues to the point of
over-saturation. It serves its purpose in creating a world where people
kill each other in brutal and painful ways, and where death is
confronted daily and accepted as a natural and expected chapter in
life.

For all its willingness to drag its audience through blood and mud and sweat in its fast-paced final hour, Apocalypto also
doesn't give them much credit. While the Mayans remain some of the more
inscrutable peoples of pre-Colombian history -- astronomers and
mathematicians while also warriors and conquerors -- Gibson creates an
angry, reactionary, contorted, frightening society where the main
motivation of life is to slake a thirst for blood through rape,
sacrifice and death. The simplified black-and-white universe Gibson
creates, where Jaguar Paw and his people represent nobility and peace
and the Mayan's duplicity and sin could be called biblical in its own
way, but mostly it just seems ignorant. The Mayan raiding party becomes
a sneering, sadistic group of slave traders who bear a resemblance to
the Orcs of the Lord of the Rings series -- grinning at death,
reveling in violence -- and the Mayan city teems with pestilence-ridden
slaves, fat, gorging noblewomen and emaciated, sharp-teethed
worshippers, all overseen by an evangelical minister-cum-temple leader
who works up the crowd into slavering devotion before cutting out
another man's heart.

Gibson claims that Apocalypto is allegorical, that the
Mayans, like the U.S., are engaged in futile efforts to shore up their
dying empire, only instead of cutting out the hearts of slaves, the
U.S. is sending soldiers to Iraq. The connection is tenuous, at best,
but at least it gives this confusing film a message, which is better
than Gibson seems to be able to do during its whole runtime.

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