Oh, Apocalypto

Just saw this at Balmoral. For starters, the gore that everyone's been yacking on about? It ain't so gory. The worst bit was when the temple guy pulled the still-beating heart out of the human sacrifice and showed it to him before decapitating him. And we saw that already in the second Indy ("Kali ma...shakti de!!") although I have to admit that Mel wasn't holding anything back. He even seems to take some sort of sadistic pleasure in slowing down the shots of people getting bashed with clubs, breaking their necks on underwater rocks, having their throats slit with huge stone knives and so on. The story did make me fairly edgy, until about two-thirds of the way through, when Jaguar Paw escapes from the marauding tribe and the huge, climactic, cliched chase sequence begins. Then I could just relax and know that he would make it safely back to his wife and child, because "(he is) Jaguar Paw! This is (his) forest!"

So to summarise: happy(ish) Mayan tribe living happily in forests of now-Mexico, maybe five hundred years ago. Village gets ransacked and torched by another bunch of bloodthirsty warriors who imprison most of the inhabitants and take them on a massive jungle march to the great temple where they are to be sacrificed to the Sun God (crops failing and so on). Luckily for Jaguar Paw, a solar eclipse occurs just as he is about to be sacrificed (gee, that was fortunate). He runs into the jungle and manages to evade, avoid or kill about seven pursuers who want him dead, as well as a panther, quicksand, a leap from a waterfall, a deadly snake, etc, all through his incredible strength, stamina, forest knowledge and self-belief (see above: "I am Jaguar Paw"). At this point I half-expected to see his murdered father appear in the night sky to guide him, in a kind of Star Wars / The Lion King thing, but only because Mel had already shown himself not above making predictable filmic references. There is a part where Zero Wolf nearly gets mashed by a tree felled by some slaves, and he yells out "I'm walking here!" Groan. Nice one. Anyway, Jaguar Paw kills everyone and makes it back to his wife and child who he has stashed in a cave for safekeeping. While he's been gone his wife has given birth underwater (really? the baby looked suspiciously unlike a newborn. Maybe she'd just been storing it for a few weeks under her skirt) and it's happy families once again. Final scene: the Spanish conquistadors are pulling up on the beach, preparing to convert and brainwash the Mayans out of existence. Cute.

So, I felt that this could have been a lot more self-conscious than it was. There was much restraint shown, on the whole, and its already been combed for the historical inaccuracies, documented here, so for those of us who aren't up on pre-Christian Mayan artefacts and culture, it looks very legit. I felt also that Mel could have made the characters seem much more primitive, and perhaps backwards, and perhaps that was the temptation, but he didn't and that added much to their credibility. Jaguar Paw would be right at home here in 2007, with his sensibility, bravery and compassionate logic. Not much call for that gruesome spring-loaded tapir-trap though.

Noticed after the film that there were a few children in the theatre that were DEFINITELY under 15: parents were there, miming out the gore and laughing as they all trooped merrily down the steps. Who sold these kids tickets to an MA 15+ movie? Shame, Balmoral!

However, Apocalyto was lots of fun, educational and intelligent. The more insane Mel Gibson gets (as in "What are you looking at, sugar tits?") the more I am intrigued by him. Quite a guy. This is a real achievement.