Central America, 16th century. Jaguar Paw is one of the Native American hunters living with a tribe in a jungle village. His pregnant wife Seven awaits his second child. One night, Maya warriors attack the village, kill many and capture a dozen villagers, including Jaguar Paw. They tie them up by the nack to several sticks and walk them to the Maya capital and start sacrifising them on the pyarmid thinking it will end a plague of their crops. When an eclipse happens, the human sacrifice is stopped. Captives are released to be hunted and killed by a Maya warlord. A wounded Jaguar Paw escapes into the jungle and kills the Maya warlords hunting him. Jaguar Paw saves Seven and his child who were stuck on the bottom of a pit during the rain. Spanish ships arrive at the beach, revealing conquistadors.
Mel Gibson's 4th directorial work, "Apocalypto" is a disturbing and brutal depiction of life of the Native Americans in the 16th century, showing once again Gibson's major problem: his fascination with blood, gore and violence rivals Tarantino at some points. On the one hand, it offers a rarely explored cinematic theme of the Maya civilization which, though inaccurate at moments (the Aztecs were actually practicing human sacrifice, the Mayas much less so), should be viewed as a meticulous attempt to reconstruct a long-gone pre-colonial world, including the clothes and the language of the Native Americans. But on the other hand, several mistakes were made in the storyline, which is a banal depiction of the hero being kidnapped by the Mayas, and then escaping from them, the end. The first act is the worst, since 18 minutes are spent on a stupid, lame subplot of the tribesmen mocking a hunter who cannot impregnate his wife, culminating in a terrible sequence where a man gives him a special leaf, the hunter rubs it on his penis, but as he goes to make love to his wife in the cottage, he screams and runs outside to jump into water to cool of his crotch, as everyone around him is laughing since they tricked him to rub an itchy leaf on his skin. This is more of an attempt at "Native American Pie" than some good writing. The rest is more serious and naturalistic, though, yet many viewers will be shocked by the cruel, vile, dark world depicted (a Mayan warlord unties a captured villager and throws him down a cliff; a Mayan priest cuts out the heart of the captured villager during human sacrifice, and throws his decapitated head rolling down the stairs of the pyramid; the protagonist uses three thorns to dip them into a poisoned frog to be later used as darts against his hunters). Some plot points are illogical (why would the protagonist hide his wife and child down a deep pit from which they cannot climb out of? Wouldn't it be better if they had fled into the jungle during the raid?), and it sends a questionable message: these people are depicted as so primitive, both in rural and urban areas, with almost no reedeming features, that the arrival of Spanish/European colonialists almost seems like a liberation and an upgrade from this quagmire, or it could be Gibson inserting a thought that the arrival of Christianity saved Mayans from these false religions of human sacrifice for harvest. It still has some other features which work, since its theme is intruiging: a civilization is not conqeured from without until it has destroyed itself from within.
Grade:++
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