Apocalypto starts with an indigenous tribe being enslaved by Mayans. Their village is destroyed, and they’re dragged in bonds to the city, passing sights of mining, deforestation, and open sewage. They’re taken up to the highest point of the city where a member of the tribe, Jaguar Paw, gets free; then he runs down the mountain back to the jungle chased by his captors. Speckled throughout is a wild tableau of extreme violence and emotionally visceral moments. Fans of heads getting caved in, heads getting chomped by jaguars, heads getting rolled down stairs, or heads sitting silently impaled atop spikes should know that there are few films that deliver head destruction with such gusto.
All of this is portrayed in an unsettlingly bloodthirsty manner while still feeling painful to the viewer, something of a trademark in Mel Gibson’s films. Much like in The Passion of the Christ (2004) you get the sense that Mel strongly believes in both meting out and receiving punishment. Unlike Passion which is fairly static in terms of movement (Christ walks slowly up a hill while getting torn to pieces for an hour), Apocalypto uses the framework of an action movie to make a film about societal and personal inertia that through the presence of its movements and themes, becomes an almost beautiful statement composed of transcendental brutality.
Apocalypto bakes its theme and movement into its structure, a rare thing in action movies, but another strong contemporary example is Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). I like to think of Fury Road‘s structure as a rubber band – Furiosa pulling against societal restraints with such accelerating power that her whole world has to stretch with her. Once she realizes that she can’t break free, the tension on the rubber band is let loose and she snaps back towards the society that formed her with all the force built by her journey remaking it completely.
Though Apocalypto also embeds large portions of its meaning in it’s movement and structure, it possesses a much more cynical take on civilization and the fruits of exertion. Here the family is sacred, but beyond that, people are only capable of consuming one another. So while Jaguar Paw does move and pull the world with him, first dragged in chains up towards civilization then running free towards the jungle and the civilization’s eventual destruction, he isn’t able to change anything. He regains his family, and gains insight into what civilization can be based on his experience traveling through the Mayan city. This gives him the wisdom to avoid what the film shows in its final moments.
I strongly disagree with Gibson’s central premise here, of an endless cycle of linear decline and destructive consumption, and subscribe more to Fury Road’s elastic view of history. I also recognize there isn’t a great deal of separation between Gibson’s personal life and his art, both chock full of abuse and anti-semitism (no opportunities for anti-semitism in this one, though it generally seems impossible for him to make a film without long stretches of insane levels of suffering and violence). Apocalypto‘s intensely surreal focus on its central premise and undeniable driving force make it a film I just can’t shake though, and to say otherwise would be dishonest. When I found out we were going to review this movie I realized that I’ve been slowly picking away at it in my head over the years since I first watched and that most of the review was more or less written. There’s not many movies I can say that about, but for better or worse Apocalypto is one of them.
Apocalypto‘s a jungle exploitation action movie with nonstop bizarre, lurid violence made by a notorious Hollywood racist, but it’s also chock full of beautiful cinematography, and rides on one of the tightest, most kinetic narratives I’ve seen in a movie in a while… despite a bad script. The Amazon in hyper-saturated digital green looks great – the slow zooms into the understory make similar images on film in better movies look positively funereal by comparison. Yet they’re nonetheless the better movies.
Consider the script, deployed in Mayan, in service to surface-level verisimilitude that’s supposed to be “awesome” but that you’re definitely not supposed to look at too closely. I appreciate and endorse the idea that spoken language itself can and should be used to advance a film’s overall style agenda – that the affect of the sound of words can be more important overall to the world of a movie than “understanding what the characters are saying” (cf. Chewbacca). But you still need a good script if you’re trying to tell a story with language, and Apocalypto‘s is such that I had the feeling that the movie would be better with subtitles off. Compare with The Duellists, where Harvey Keitel’s bizarro Brooklyn accent positively rings out in uncaring conflict with the end of the 18th century – the disjunction fares better there because the script is actually pretty good. When I showed this text to Davey, he said his favorite line in the movie happens when a tree almost falls near a Mayan, and the Mayan yells, in Mayan Pacino-mode, “I’m walkin’ here!”
The narrative, on the other hand, is a there-and-back-again where the main guy gets dragged to the top of a ziggurat, gets saved by a deus ex machina, and then runs the whole way back. Structurally it’s super effective – the whole front half is like a spring tensing, setting up references and signposts, and then the back half is explosive movement back past a distorted version of everything that came before. I found it amazing and disorienting that this aspect of the movie was so well-constructed while the script itself was so throwaway.
In total I file this under “I don’t recommend it but I’m glad I watched it.” If you want “native man in a native-language-only mythical running movie,” Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001) is a way, way better Inuit take on this model; for “power/violence/desecration in a hell reality” you might as well go all the way to Salo (1975); for Amazon mindmelts, I still like Embrace of the Serpent (2016). But if you feel this ButRic video (which remixes the movie’s best scene) as much as I do, and can stomach a gnarly curiosity, you might want to follow the feeling.