Apocalypto

Apocalypto

Dir: Mel Gibson

Starring: Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez

Here’s an interesting question: Just how bad can a good movie be?

Answer? Appallingly bad.

Case in point: Apocalypto. For make no mistake, Apocalypto is a good movie.

Never let it be said that Mel Gibson does not know how to make a film. He does.

He knows how to create and maintain tension, he was a decent eye for vivid, unfussy cinematography, and he elicits good, believable performances from his actors. As an action/chase film, Apocalypto is gold standard.

But make no mistake: Apocalypto competes for the status of worst film of the year.

It’s difficult to know where to start, but we could probably do worse than discussing the utter darkness of Gibson’s heart.

I’m not talking about unfortunate road-side monologues on the war-like nature of the Jewish race. If you’re going to stop enjoying a work of art because of the anti-Semitism of its creator, you’re going to have to stop appreciating T. S. Eliot, and if you do that a small piece of you will die forever.

You can search as hard as you like for anti-Semitism in Apocalypto, but you won’t find it. The darkness here is in the violence.

Now, I rather like a bit of gratuitous violence. I like Die Hard, I like Terminator. But when I’m forced to watch scenes of wives being beaten and raped in front of their husbands, or women and children slaughtered at leisure, I do feel there should be some point to it all.

Without a point, one can only presume that watching it is somehow meant to be pleasant in its own right, which it most certainly is not.

The historical value of these scenes is non-existent, they’re not there to communicate any sort of message, and they develop neither character nor plot. As this becomes increasingly clear, you slowly develop the conviction that Gibson must simply enjoy making them.

It would all be acceptable if the film contained a level of historical accuracy, allowing the violence to be passed off as an attempt to educate us about the nature of a civilisation. But let’s make something clear: Gibson knows nothing about the Maya.

The saddest historical fact about the film is his use of the Yukatek Maya language and an unknown (and very good) set of Mexican and Native American actors, for these combine to give the film an invaluable air of authenticity to which it has no legitimate claim.

The actions of the Maya leadership which constitute the plot of the film – the gathering of villager Maya for sacrifice in a metropolitan centre – simply did not happen (or if it did, we don’t know about it).

In actual fact, members of the royal family were as likely to be sacrificed as commoners.

The Maya are presented as a brutal, primitive race, as incapable of compassion as they are of operating an ipod.

There’s little mention here of their ability to produce extremely accurate astronomical predictions, or the fact that they developed the concept of zero while Europeans were still smearing faeces over the walls of their bedrooms.

I don’t suppose that much of the audience for Apocalypto will ever encounter Mayan history again, and the knowledge they leave this film with will be tragically false.

In Gibson’s world, humans are a nasty bunch. Every so often there’s a bloke who loves his family, but generally we’re all a bunch of violent thieves and rapists, even when we have no particular reason to be.

Under Gibson’s nasty and puerile lens, the standard human behaviour is cruelty, with any kindness standing as some sort of insane anomaly. It is simply impossible to grasp the motivation of the characters without accepting this premise.

If Gibson had wrapped what is basically a long chase scene into Lethal Weapon packaging I’d have told you that he’s proving himself a highly capable action film director.

Unfortunately, the chase is wrapped in packaging that suggests some great meaning, a meaning which is never specified and which will evade your grasp no matter how hard you waste your time looking for it.

It would be difficult to find a more appropriate film upon which to attach Shakespeare’s metaphor of “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Gibson’s thematic vision remains as empty and vacuous as a child playing with his bellybutton.