[Aztlan] Another Apacalypto Review - Austin American Statesman

[Elaine Day Schele]

Gore meets grandeur for a weird mix
By Chris Garcia
Austin American Statesman 



"Apocalypto" is the best horror movie of the year. It's a sadistically, sociopathically violent spectacle that devolves from gripping action film to a relentless phantasmagoria of graphic carnage that hammers you with gory image after gory image - blood, guts, brains, heads, limbs - in the service of message that's at best murky.

In a mere three films, including "Braveheart" and "The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson proves our most high-minded exploitation director. He's driven by an unquenchable thirst for clinically depicted slaughter for its own sake. Gibson absolutely loves death and the multifarious ways in which living beings can have life whipped, bludgeoned, crushed or impaled out of them. By the end of his films, you numbly wonder, What was that all about?

Like "Passion" before it, "Apocalypto," a simple action adventure set in the 16th-century world of the Maya, is a celebration, a downright giddy exaltation, of the furious destruction of flesh. It's a twisted movie - one of the year's weirdest - dense with alternately gross and gorgeous imagery that leaves you feeling only the breathless buzz of a full-bore cinematic assault.

"Apocalypto" has a lavish, expensive look that sucks you in, and Gibson directs action frenzy, from battles to pursuits, with powerful precision and clarity. Achieving stunning DeMillian scale, he spins your head with wonder at a sprawling Maya city dominated by temple pyramids upon which (much) human sacrifice occurs. And he plunks you deep within the impregnable thickets of Central American jungle to capture exhilarating foot chases of man and beast.

But what, amid all the screaming and bloodshed, is the movie about? Depending on your angle, Gibson's message can be wholesomely archetypal - that family, loyalty and conquering one's fears are universal human virtues worth fighting for - or rather suspect - that the savage Maya destroyed their own civilization only to be delivered - or further wrecked - by the cross-bearing Spanish conquistadors, who paddle ashore ominously at film's end. 

Gibson enlists a quote from philosopher Will Durant to begin his epic: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." If he is suggesting that the Maya brought ruin upon themselves, opening the door for western cultural and religious domination by their brutal ways, then "Apocalypto" lurches past ick-sploitation to a murky editorial about self-rule and imperialism. A big problem is that Gibson fails to specify what exactly made the Maya implode. Was it their belligerence? Their penchant for human sacrifice and paganism?

Co-written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia, with dialogue spoken entirely in the Yucatec dialect, the story bears the streamlined simplicity of myth. It moves from the peaceful hunting village of young Jaguar Paw (a sturdy, loin-clothed Rudy Youngblood), who is bound to learn life lessons along the way, to the orgiastic tumult of the Maya city, which looks to be run by a bloodthirsty voodoo cult. Some of them are Holcane warriors, who rape and plunder Jaguar Paw's idyll, snatching up all able men and women for slavery and sacrifice, leaving the children to wander among the remaining corpses. This, Gibson suggests with an eye on current world events, is the sort of internecine mayhem that topples civilizations. 

Here is where Gibson rubs his hands together and pours on the horror imagery. Somehow he imagines Maya culture as a vortex of writhing naked women, the physically disfigured, architecturally curious hairstyles and shrunken human heads on pikes. Never mind the Maya's historical achievements in math, science, writing and art, he seems to say. Just look at their savagery!

And he makes us look, lingeringly. Terrified sacrificial victims are lined up to have their hearts cut from their chests by a distinctly satanic priest garbed in feathers and paint and human bones, with clawlike fingernails and wild eyes. With palpable contempt, Gibson sums up all of Maya evil in this raving demon-shaman, who proceeds to behead his victims and hurl their bodies down the pyramid steps into a pile of mortal gore. 

It would be nice to get some context for the violence, but Gibson refuses to illuminate the cultural and religious forces behind the ritualized murder, the better to paint these people as barbaric monsters. Gibson clearly gets off on the butchery, and you almost can't believe the extent to which he does. Over and over he sticks in your face thumping human hearts, heads bouncing like basketballs, flesh ripping and head wounds spraying mists of blood as if from an aerosol can.

If "Apocalypto" is punishing viewing, it is also impressive, breathtaking and transporting. Standard action-flick thrills abound, all of it executed with stylish verve and a tough lyricism. Yet when all is said and done, it's just a fancier version of the most notorious jungle-savage exploitation film ever made, 1980's Italian grossout "Cannibal Holocaust." 

That's why the movie is so strange. Gibson, too, is growing stranger and stranger in the public eye. Maybe this is his weirdo masterpiece, an artful extravaganza of splatter from a former action star who's become film's new poet of blunt trauma.