Gibson's Apocalypto: Super-Real, Super-Violent

Any cinephile will want to see Apocalypto, because it boasts bravura filmmaking. The squeamish may want to put down their popcorn, especially in the opening scenes. Director and co-writer Mel Gibson loves to shock us. Red-blooded action fans will get their adrenaline rush, assuming they can manage the subtitles. One could imagine actors playing these roles in English, but it wouldn't be as real. Gibson is seeking authenticity.

There's never a dull moment. The best sequences are like the one pictured above: Indians running full-tilt through the jungle, muscles rippling, hearts pumping to the max, tracked by cinematographer Dean Semler's cameras whizzing through the blurry underbrush. (Sheigh Crabtree reports on those cameras in the LAT on Sunday.)

Gibson wanted to film a chase movie, close to the ground, and that's exactly what he did. Some scenes make us gasp at their audacity and beauty—there's a moment when the sky turns dark and our exhausted hero turns to see the flash of his pursuers' torches in the forest, moving relentlessly toward him. The cameras go everywhere: over the river, through the trees, under the water.

But Gibson is compelled to go too far, sometimes ludicrously. He removes pumping hearts from heaving chests, lops off sacrificial heads and bounces them down the Mayan Temple steps. Blood spurts out of an artery at a 90 degree angle. Much of the mayhem and carnage is hard to take. One can argue for realism, but on the other hand, the many strokes of luck that spare our young hero's life—and we very much want him to live—stack up a tad implausibly.

Apocalypto recalls John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King (without any English-speaking white people) in the way Gibson takes us back to an exotic ancient culture. It also has the atavistic violence of the Indian films Black Robe and The Fast Runner. Apocalypto is unpredictable. Even Green. ("I'm no tree hugger," Gibson insisted to EW.) The message seems to be: don't mess with Mother Nature, or she will kick your ass.

Dare I say it? The movie could nab an Oscar nom or two. Maybe Cinematography, like The Passion of the Christ, which also earned noms for Makeup and Original Score. If Gibson hadn't misbehaved, it might have been more.

Here's Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. And here's THR's Kirk Honeycutt.

Comments

[Sergio]

I don't have at all a problem with violence in movies yet like you I was really put off by it in this film. (I literally had to squint my eyes at some of the stuff I knew was coming) I think because it was so over-the-top and needlessly hyper graphic. Unlike Pan Labryinth another very disturbingly violent film, but in which the brutal nature has a point, Gibson comes off like a really scary 15 year old kid who gets off grossing out people.

Also though the cinematography is nice most of the time it was shot on digital video (like Superman Returns and Deja Vu) and I can easily tell in some shots in particular low night and night scenes. Now it's nowhere as bad as the crummy digital photography in Miami Vice or Collateral which looked like they were shot on a cheap home video camera bought in a drug store, but I've yet to see any movie shot in video that can still compare to film.

[Andrey Berzin]

Our reaction to the movies that Mel Gibson has so pationtly came obout for us to watch, is the result from the massage that is hidden openly in the plot of the movie. If Mel is capble of doing so then Im just eager to meet him some time in life and share the ideas that I wish we can bring forth to the Nation of America. So Mel God Bless U.

[Caff]

Sergio, this film isn't any more graphic than Braveheart. Mel said it best, this isn't a hyper graphic film. If you want hyper graphic, go see some teeny bopper horror flick where a 18 year old gets impaled on a meat hook...does the press bash these crap films? No. The press is hungry for drama, and unfortunately for Mel he created a little drama. They are calling it super violent. Its graphic but nothing we havent seen before..and remember, they pulled out hearts in Indian Jones 2, and that wasnt rated R. Go see it, its a great film about love, and hope. Stop talking about celebs personal lives, who are we to point a finger????