Chris Knipp
12-12-2006, 03:27 PM
Mel Gibson: APOCALYPTO (2006)
More violence, greater speed, a relieving detachment
Review by Chris Knipp
Apocalypto is the final entry in Gibson’s declared “Ordeal” trilogy – Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ being the first two. But does anyone seriously think he’s going to switch to romantic comedy? He clearly revels in gore, and he is a master showman in its exploitation.
Apocalypto's dialogue is in a version of Yucatec, the Maya language, but spoken by Americans and Mexicans, stiltedly, slowly. Despite elaborate temples, terrifying bloodthirsty rituals, naked crowds of painted bodies (some corpse-like, à la Apocalypse Now’s final Mistah Kurtz Heart of Darkness sequence), men draped in feathers and bones with ornate, threatening coiffures and bristling with piercings, naked muscle and nasty looks, it doesn’t feel authentic. This is due most of all to the use of a mixture of non-Mayan actors in the leads, as well as the focus only on the cruelest aspects of Maya culture, which aren't rendered quite accurately. There were no mass killings of captives or mass graves, according to historians; nor are captive slaves known to have been used as laborers or sacrificial victims. It is also inaccurate to imply that the civilization of the Maya was in major decline right when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century; the greatest decline occurred centuries earlier. One doesn't want to think about how the Maya people of today will greet this purely sadistic version of their ancestors, who had one of the most highly developed of stone age cultures.
But that doesn’t keep Gibson's story from being involving. Eventually in the rush of violent action, you forget this is a somewhat dubious (and perhaps to real descendants of the culture referred to, offensive) fabrication. In some sense that doesn’t matter, because what feels authentic ultimately is the gore. When the high priest cuts the heart out of a sacrificial victim, it seems like a reasonable facsimile.
The filmmaking craft is good enough so you feel like you’re up there, panting with exhaustion and dizzy with terror. The teeming crowd, the bound and scarred captives, their sweat and their fear and their heavy, terrified breathing, seem pretty real.
Then comes the sudden and brief solar eclipse that scares the hierophants so they stop the sacrifices – a narrative device said to be nicked from a Tintin episode – and this leads to a private Roman coliseum-like event. The captives, though not to be sacrificed, are still to be got rid of, by having them run toward the forest while dodging spears and arrows. Faster and craftier and stronger-willed than the others, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), the hero, begins a long flight pursued by the evil slave drivers.
This chase au naturel – no Mini-Coopers, no helicopters, only snakes, panthers, hornet nests, inky black swamps, breathtaking waterfalls, and body-piercing arrows and spears – staged at breathtaking speed and seamlessly edited, takes on a pure kinetic energy. There is no point in this prolonged flight and pursuit sequence, but it’s the part of the movie that is least distracting and most successful. As actioner stuff, it’s superb, a triumph of simple but highly accomplished filmmaking. It has such energy and sweep the violence is absorbed into it.
Gibson’s violence is the primitive kind – were Auschwitz, Dresden, or Hiroshima less sadistic? If this is human nature, shouldn't we look at it up close? I find myself defending Gibson's use of it because I saw beauty in this exhilarating flight, perhaps since I have always loved running, and have been a longtime runner myself. In a sense JP, AKA, Rudy, is running away from all the nauseating violence, as we would surely like to do. The sequence captures the pure joy of escape from all personal problems and social pressures a distance runner momentarily feels, the sense of freedom and invincibility, the natural high. I would not defend the violence of The Passion of the Christ. In his previous “Ordeals” Gibson was evoking some sort of personal Celtic roots, and delving into some sadistic version of his neo-con Christianity. Here the action is at a further remove from him and from me. Surely the Maya at point of decline are used only as a pretext. And that seems wrong, but it displaces our discomfort.
Youngblood is lithe as a jaguar, but as important, he has a pure, innocent face with wide-open, eager eyes. He’s a kind of Noble Savage, ready for the "new beginning" (the meaning of apocalypto in Greek) he speaks to his wife of after he rescues her.
Gibson’s finale has a subconscious note of obvious racism: Jaguar’s pursuers drop him at the seaside when they sight the Conquistadors’ waiting ships, as if to say the big guys have arrived – our little stuff doesn’t matter any more.
No persons of Maya descent were used for main roles, I understand. Youngblood is an American of Indian, Hispanic, and African-American heritage; his original family name was Gonzalez. The early scenes in Apocalypto are terrible. The actors are too big, they aren’t Maya, they're too different from each other. Jaguar Paw’s wife (Dalia Hernandez) looks Spanish. The sexual teasing of the soon-to-be captured forest hunter tribesmen is excruciatingly crude and corny at the same time. It’s really embarrassing. It’s only when the violence begins that Gibson is in his element and the movie becomes bearable, at first hard to watch (the captures, the trek to the Maya capital, the sacrifices, the sadistic glee of the leading slaver), and then compelling (the chase, which is like a native American marathon). Then one’s left flat, with a portentous moment for which one was unprepared, like the end of an episode of Planet of the Apes.
So, yes, there is some highly effective and original (or at least daringly over-the-top violent) filmmaking here. But finally, you ask yourself, What’s the point of all this? And the answer is, there was no more point to Christ’s Passion, chez Gibson: it’s all just a bloody, bloodthirsty and terrifying spectacle, a primitive but irresistible mass entertainment like the slaying of gladiators in the Roman amphitheatre – an ordeal you enjoy because it’s not happening to you. Nothing more. No redeeming values beyond the moviemaking skills – the strong sense of the visual Tarantino notes in The Passion of the Christ. (Using a subtitled dead language for dialogue is sort of a way of making a film more like a silent.) The contrarian film critic Armond White notes this, citing Tarantino with approval; he seems to have a liking for fanciful film versions of pre-Columbian people, since he welcomed Terrence Malick’s interesting and beautiful but ineffectual The New World this time last year with equal fervor. Now after a drunk driving arrest and an anti-Semitic rant Gibson’s stock is down. But the relatively unspectacular first weekend take of Apocalypto ($14 million vs. Passion of the Christ’s $70) isn’t due so much to that as to the new film's not getting Passion’s exceptional church-assisted pre-opening promotion. The real controversy may come next year, when this opens in Latin America.
More violence, greater speed, a relieving detachment
Review by Chris Knipp
Apocalypto is the final entry in Gibson’s declared “Ordeal” trilogy – Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ being the first two. But does anyone seriously think he’s going to switch to romantic comedy? He clearly revels in gore, and he is a master showman in its exploitation.
Apocalypto's dialogue is in a version of Yucatec, the Maya language, but spoken by Americans and Mexicans, stiltedly, slowly. Despite elaborate temples, terrifying bloodthirsty rituals, naked crowds of painted bodies (some corpse-like, à la Apocalypse Now’s final Mistah Kurtz Heart of Darkness sequence), men draped in feathers and bones with ornate, threatening coiffures and bristling with piercings, naked muscle and nasty looks, it doesn’t feel authentic. This is due most of all to the use of a mixture of non-Mayan actors in the leads, as well as the focus only on the cruelest aspects of Maya culture, which aren't rendered quite accurately. There were no mass killings of captives or mass graves, according to historians; nor are captive slaves known to have been used as laborers or sacrificial victims. It is also inaccurate to imply that the civilization of the Maya was in major decline right when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century; the greatest decline occurred centuries earlier. One doesn't want to think about how the Maya people of today will greet this purely sadistic version of their ancestors, who had one of the most highly developed of stone age cultures.
But that doesn’t keep Gibson's story from being involving. Eventually in the rush of violent action, you forget this is a somewhat dubious (and perhaps to real descendants of the culture referred to, offensive) fabrication. In some sense that doesn’t matter, because what feels authentic ultimately is the gore. When the high priest cuts the heart out of a sacrificial victim, it seems like a reasonable facsimile.
The filmmaking craft is good enough so you feel like you’re up there, panting with exhaustion and dizzy with terror. The teeming crowd, the bound and scarred captives, their sweat and their fear and their heavy, terrified breathing, seem pretty real.
Then comes the sudden and brief solar eclipse that scares the hierophants so they stop the sacrifices – a narrative device said to be nicked from a Tintin episode – and this leads to a private Roman coliseum-like event. The captives, though not to be sacrificed, are still to be got rid of, by having them run toward the forest while dodging spears and arrows. Faster and craftier and stronger-willed than the others, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), the hero, begins a long flight pursued by the evil slave drivers.
This chase au naturel – no Mini-Coopers, no helicopters, only snakes, panthers, hornet nests, inky black swamps, breathtaking waterfalls, and body-piercing arrows and spears – staged at breathtaking speed and seamlessly edited, takes on a pure kinetic energy. There is no point in this prolonged flight and pursuit sequence, but it’s the part of the movie that is least distracting and most successful. As actioner stuff, it’s superb, a triumph of simple but highly accomplished filmmaking. It has such energy and sweep the violence is absorbed into it.
Gibson’s violence is the primitive kind – were Auschwitz, Dresden, or Hiroshima less sadistic? If this is human nature, shouldn't we look at it up close? I find myself defending Gibson's use of it because I saw beauty in this exhilarating flight, perhaps since I have always loved running, and have been a longtime runner myself. In a sense JP, AKA, Rudy, is running away from all the nauseating violence, as we would surely like to do. The sequence captures the pure joy of escape from all personal problems and social pressures a distance runner momentarily feels, the sense of freedom and invincibility, the natural high. I would not defend the violence of The Passion of the Christ. In his previous “Ordeals” Gibson was evoking some sort of personal Celtic roots, and delving into some sadistic version of his neo-con Christianity. Here the action is at a further remove from him and from me. Surely the Maya at point of decline are used only as a pretext. And that seems wrong, but it displaces our discomfort.
Youngblood is lithe as a jaguar, but as important, he has a pure, innocent face with wide-open, eager eyes. He’s a kind of Noble Savage, ready for the "new beginning" (the meaning of apocalypto in Greek) he speaks to his wife of after he rescues her.
Gibson’s finale has a subconscious note of obvious racism: Jaguar’s pursuers drop him at the seaside when they sight the Conquistadors’ waiting ships, as if to say the big guys have arrived – our little stuff doesn’t matter any more.
No persons of Maya descent were used for main roles, I understand. Youngblood is an American of Indian, Hispanic, and African-American heritage; his original family name was Gonzalez. The early scenes in Apocalypto are terrible. The actors are too big, they aren’t Maya, they're too different from each other. Jaguar Paw’s wife (Dalia Hernandez) looks Spanish. The sexual teasing of the soon-to-be captured forest hunter tribesmen is excruciatingly crude and corny at the same time. It’s really embarrassing. It’s only when the violence begins that Gibson is in his element and the movie becomes bearable, at first hard to watch (the captures, the trek to the Maya capital, the sacrifices, the sadistic glee of the leading slaver), and then compelling (the chase, which is like a native American marathon). Then one’s left flat, with a portentous moment for which one was unprepared, like the end of an episode of Planet of the Apes.
So, yes, there is some highly effective and original (or at least daringly over-the-top violent) filmmaking here. But finally, you ask yourself, What’s the point of all this? And the answer is, there was no more point to Christ’s Passion, chez Gibson: it’s all just a bloody, bloodthirsty and terrifying spectacle, a primitive but irresistible mass entertainment like the slaying of gladiators in the Roman amphitheatre – an ordeal you enjoy because it’s not happening to you. Nothing more. No redeeming values beyond the moviemaking skills – the strong sense of the visual Tarantino notes in The Passion of the Christ. (Using a subtitled dead language for dialogue is sort of a way of making a film more like a silent.) The contrarian film critic Armond White notes this, citing Tarantino with approval; he seems to have a liking for fanciful film versions of pre-Columbian people, since he welcomed Terrence Malick’s interesting and beautiful but ineffectual The New World this time last year with equal fervor. Now after a drunk driving arrest and an anti-Semitic rant Gibson’s stock is down. But the relatively unspectacular first weekend take of Apocalypto ($14 million vs. Passion of the Christ’s $70) isn’t due so much to that as to the new film's not getting Passion’s exceptional church-assisted pre-opening promotion. The real controversy may come next year, when this opens in Latin America.