Apocalypto (2006)
An enslaved hunter escapes the ancient Mayans in a desperate bid to return to his wife and child.
Director: Mel Gibson
Runtime: 2hr 19min including credits.
Apocalypto opens on a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the Mesoamerican jungle, hunting a tapir. The camaraderie and vulnerability that they convey in this scene establishes theirs as a rich culture, uncannily familiar in their concerns over child-rearing and manliness. Their way of life is destroyed and their people are enslaved in a vicious raid by the Mayans, but one of the hunters, Jaguar Paw, manages to conceal his wife and child from the carnage.
This is a tricky movie to evaluate, and perhaps best tests whether one is willing to separate art from the artist. It is clearly an achievement in technical filmmaking. The vast, real-life jungle sets and elaborate costumes are some of the best put to film, and the story is a towering testament to both the brutality and strength within the human soul. It is unfortunately hard to ignore director Mel Gibson’s obvious fascination with violence, which tends to cross the line of artistic licence into the obscene.
Apocalypto is not an historical film, but something greater. The ravaging of Jaguar Paw’s tribe is an ancient human experience, an unsung tragedy inflicted on countless generations of our ancestors who have felt the fire of conquest. When the glory of battle is stripped away, what is left is the wholesale destruction of a people. This is one of the few movies that is willing, for better or worse, to detail what most war is truly about: rape and plunder.
Jaguar Paw and his tribe are led by their captors into the moral rot that has infested the heart of the Mayan kingdom. Now a crescendo of terrible anticipation builds. First they pass through a lumber yard, where a colossal tree nearly crushes them as it falls. Then they are taken through blighted crops where starving Mayans clot the roadways and a mad beggar clings to Jaguar Paw for salvation. They are led through a quarry, where dust-coated slaves are being worked to death as they decorate a palace. Jaguar Paw and his tribe must wonder what their ultimate fate could be, as each more horrific possibility comes and goes. The audience is prompted to ponder same question.
The answer is awesome to behold: they are to be offerings in a ritual of human sacrifice atop a great pyramid. By now, the film has earned excruciating tension by priming the audience as follows:
We know that Mel Gibson is willing to “go there” in his depiction of realistic, ugly violence, so no horror is beyond imagining.
We are intimately familiar with the beating hearts and heaving chests of the tribes-people’s bodies, making the violence all the more visceral.
We are reminded that Jaguar Paw has a wife and child awaiting his return.
This tension reaches a fever-pitch of blood, sweat and dust at the apex of the pyramid, where frightful priests are carving up the villagers one by one for a blood-thirsty crowd. Finally, it is our hero’s turn. It is both inevitable and unimaginable that he will die.
But fate intervenes on his behalf. Jaguar Paw gets a glimmer of hope and a chance to attempt escape back to his jungle, but in so doing, he starts a bloody vendetta against the military commander who captured him in the first place. The board is thus set: can Jaguar Paw escape a vengeful Mayan general and get back to his family?
Apocalypto needs to be seen in motion. The camera-work makes for interesting screenshots and still images, but truly shines as an involved agent in the film. This was one of the first movies to use digital cameras, which allowed for greater versatility in the jungle sets than what celluloid would allow. The innovative technology augments daring stunts such as the one below. This shot was achieved without CGI. That is a real jaguar, restrained by a rope, chasing down actor Rudy Youngblood. I doubt his look of terror required much acting.
Apocalypto evolves from extra-historical drama into a neolithic chase movie, one that delights in bone-chilling thrills and spectacular action. We have a deeply compelling main character to root for in Jaguar Paw, being hounded by an antagonist who is both formidable and justified in his pursuit.
Despite how disturbing Apocalypto can be at times, it is nonetheless an essential film. I would not recommend it to a sensitive viewer, and it should be tagged with every trigger warning there is, but if you have the stomach for something both unique and universal, here is a film that will knock your socks off.
My Favourite Line:
My name is Jaguar Paw. I am a hunter. This is my forest. And my sons will hunt it with their sons after I am gone.
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You can stream this movie on Amazon for FREE!