APOCALYPTO

To view the trailer, click the pic^

AFLOPALYPTO:
A Review Chock-Full Of Rancid Spoilerz

And so it was that midway between the portentous events of 911 and the impending, legendary date of the prophecied Maya apocalypse, that one man in a bad ZZ-Top beard would be sent into the jungles of South America to lend his modern vision to the indigenous people of that land, promising them the opportunity of a lifetime to be exploited for the lining of his pockets, in the name of sleaze film-making in order that their personal integrity be ritually sacrificed at the altars of the modern cineplex.

So bodes the dawning of a movie that does nothing to advance our mutual understanding of an historical people, but rather, compounds and furthers age-old negative stereotypes of the sort the rest of the human race dreams of shedding itself of completely. As a lowly acolyte at the height of our own decadent empire, allow me this evisceration of the filmmaker known as "Mel Gibson," so that I may hold his raw, beating heart aloft in my fist for all to clearly examine its outline.

Apocalypto is incredibly generic film-making. In the movie Braveheart, with its themes of ancestral heroism most red-blooded male Caucasians can at least pretend to relate to, Gibson somehow managed to spoon feed us what we wanted (while keeping the wool over our eyes). He knew all the right buttons to push to keep us satisfied (speaking on behalf of my red-blooded American male contingency, at least). Lord knows how bad that movie must really have been, looking in hindsight.

In tackling a more distinctly foreign civilization -- that of the ancient Maya at the tail-end of their grandeur -- it seems Mel Gibson has unwittingly bitten off way more than he is capable of chewing, and in so doing has revealed to the few astute audience members he has left, that as an artist working behind the camera, his vision is not only getting limited, but indeed, almost bankrupt of nuance and originality.

I hate to have to say it (because I always liked Mel Gibson the actor), but Apocalypto ends up being precisely what I went to the theater hoping to avoid. I went in yearning for a startling and convincing depiction of what Maya civilization may actually have looked like. I went in hoping to be led by his lens into a detailed landscape offering up what it might really have been like to wander goggle-eyed through a thriving Maya city. Instead, I got your typical, postcard depiction of tyrannical sacrifice we've all read or heard about since the days Merrie Melodies brought us face to face with the traditional, stylized cartoons of big-lipped cannibals and head hunter pygmies.

If that weren't reason enough to avoid this spectacle of cliches, how about a story line so simplistic, it's as if it were filmed with six crew members outside a cheap shantytown off Rio de Janeiro -- in between trips to the local bar & brothel -- to shoot what is effectively no more than an anachronistic episode of COPS?

Many are the moments when the diligent audience member is jarred from their pseudo reverie by crass camera work that suddenly has the feel of having been shot with a video cam, producing the disastrous effect of revealing the characters for what they really are: bad actors in shoddy costumes.
*Rancid Spoilers to follow!*
With the entire first half of the movie consisting of a painstaking set-up to have our protagonist captured for the stereotypical ritual sacrifice scene, (upon which the one opportunity for real excitement is squandered entirely when the mechanism for his escape is not of his own volition, but rather, the bloated and preposterously foreshadowed "solar eclipse" which occurs precisely before his turn to be sacrificed), and then the last half of this dead-in-the-dirt enterprise in paint-by-numbers formulaics focuses on his interminable running escape from his captors; by the time this slick, glossy, soulless monstrosity of quasi-propaganda is over, every sensitive, discerning viewer in the audience will have wished ten times over they were ritually sacrificed if only it could have spared them the sight of this backwoods blockbuster and its predictable viewpoint of the Maya people.

Give it up, Mel. You've given up the ghost already. Here's the naked heart of your movie exposed for all to see, and it ain't pretty. I know you're a swell family guy and all, and you're a great movie star but please, for the sake of forestalling the decline of our own corrupt civilization, stop directing movies. Let someone more qualified work behind the camera. Thanks.