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.