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Decline
and Fall APOCALYPTO:
Directed by Mel Gibson. Written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia. Cinematography,
Deam Semler. Music, James Horner. Starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez,
Raoul Trujillo, Gerardo Taracena and Mayra Serbulo. Touchstone Pictures,
2006. R. 139 minutes.
At the small, speedily beating heart of Apocalypto is a story about a guy who just wants to get back to his wife. It's a familiar hero's journey, but in the strange vision of director Mel Gibson, it's story steeped in blood and gore, a tale set at what seems to be the end of the Mayan Empire, imagined as a fantasyland of violence. It's not the human sacrifices, the stabbings and the throat-slitting that are the problem; it's the carefully rendered way they appear on screen, more vital to the story than character or dialogue. Apocalypto opens with a quote from historian Will Durant: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." This portentous snippet begs the question of what, precisely, Gibson is getting at. Are we the bloodthirsty Mayans, our leaders so corrupt that another culture will shortly run rampant over our excessive ways? Or do the countries that we invade deserve their downfalls, since they let it happen? Either way, it's a lot of moral heft for what is essentially a rather typical, if extremely bloody, action adventure film. After a scene-setting tapir kill and subsequent feast, Apocalypto's hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), awakens to find his peaceful village under attack. With his friends and neighbors, J.P. is dragged off to a great city where innocent villagers are sold as slaves or sacrificed atop a towering pyramid. The city itself is the most tantalizing character in Apocalypto: Teeming, dirty, ever-growing, it is a place where the wondrous and the terrible coexist on every corner. An ominous eclipse (unnecessarily prophesied by a plague-stricken child) saves J.P. from the sacrificial knife, but he'll have to evade more knives — and snakes, jaguars, arrows, clubs and spears — before his journey ends. A cliché-ridden jungle chase seems to go on for much of the second half of the movie, and by the time Jaguar Paw dives from a waterfall and emerges unscathed from the pool below, the sequence's initial tension has been swapped for cinematic ridiculousness of an almost Bruckheimer/Bay degree. Youngblood, like most of the film's hitherto unknown actors, fully embodies his role, spending little time messing about with dialogue but saying everything necessary with a panicked turn of his head. But he's little more than the outline of a Good Guy, running through the (lushly filmed and undeniably deadly) jungle from the Bad Guys, the lot of them about to face something wholly alien. The end of a civilization's dominion is a scenario rich with possibility, with the what-ifs and might-have-beens of different paths and the imagined lives of people whose existences were so drastically different from our own. But Gibson's self-described "chase film" is interested in none of this beyond a cursory look at the struggle between empire and independence. As far as he sprints, Jaguar Paw can't outdistance the looming future; as long as Gibson's film runs, it can't get out from under the director's continued fascination with the indignities man visits on man.
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