Apocalypto: Apocapointless

Temple 1 in Tikal

Mel Gibson may be a douche of a self-pious bigot, but there can be no denying the man is a master storyteller. That, combined with my interest in pre-Columbian American civilizations, had me looking forward to his movie Apocalypto more than perhaps any other this year.

Boy was I disappointed. My laundry list of complaints is long, but to sum up: It was unrealistic and outrageous. Stop reading if you don’t want to be spoiled, but as the whole movie is instantly predictable it doesn’t really matter.

• Predictability: The movie comes in essentially two acts: Our Hero's capture and then escape. There is literally not a single plot thread that anyone paying the slightest bit of attention couldn’t predict with 100% accuracy 1/4 of the way through the movie.
  
• Outrageous coincidences: All of this happens in one roughly 72 hour timespan: Our Hero’s (from here on known as “OH”) village is attacked, there is a solar eclipse, OH’s wife has a baby, and the Spaniards arrive. And it all happens at the most opportune times imaginable. The eclipse happens at the exact second OH is laid out on the sacrificial altar with the priest’s hands raised ready to kill him. OH’s baby is born just seconds before he arrives to rescue his family. The Spaniards arrive at the exact minute in the exact place necessary to save OH from his pursuers. Not in a million years, Mel.
  
• Imaginative geography and timeline: OH is captured from his barbarian village and over the course of a one-and-a-half-day march, taken to Tikal, greatest of Mayan cities. OH has never heard of Tikal and is completely unaware of the existence of a larger civilization beyond his hunter-gatherer village. In real life, Tikal was the center of a great empire and would have been well-known to anyone living such a short distance away. Indeed, anyone living within 2 days walk of the city would have been a subject of the empire, if not a citizen. It gets worse. As noted earlier, the Spanish arrive at the end of the movie, which would set the movie sometime in the early 1500’s. But Tikal was a classic-period Mayan city which flourished fully 1,000 years before then and was largely abandoned by end of the 10th Century. Oops.
  
• B-O-R-I-N-G: Like I said earlier, the movie comes in essentially two acts. It’s two-and-a-half hours long. You do the math. The thing drags.
  
• Made-up cultural history: One would think that in a movie which goes to such great lengths to achieve realism that actors speak in the native, ancient language, there would be at least an attempt to get the most basic things about their culture correct. What’s the one thing everyone knows about the Mayans, and which this movie is largely based on? The practice of human sacrifice. Unfortunately, the movie’s attitude towards the practice shifts with whatever plot event is most convenient. I won’t go into specifics, but it was wrong, wrong, wrong.
  
• Needless violence: Here’s the thing, though. The Mayans really did kill humans as part of their religion, and in a movie with battles, conquest and chase scenes on top of human sacrifice, there was plenty of opportunity for “legitimate” violence. Why, then, did Gibson feel the need to contrive cultural practices of even greater violence? The “escape game”, where OH runs into the corn field was totally fabricated and completely gratuitous. It is proof that Gibson had no interest in telling an engaging or meaningful story, and simply wanted to pack as much death and destruction into one movie as humanly possible.

... And that’s really the story of the film: A pointless excuse to kill a lot of people and show a lot of blood. I don’t object to violence in movies, but there ought to be a point somewhere in there, or at least a plot beyond “good guy escapes from bad guys”. The supposed morality lesson about the death of civilizations was basically non-existent. The one positive was the short scene in Tikal itself, which although it suffered from many of the same sort of problems as mentioned above, was at least visually cool. Points for that, I guess.
Overall, thumbs way down.

Tags: entertainment