*** (out of ****)
Starring Rudy Youngblood, Raoul Trujillo, and Dalia Hernandez.
Directed by Mel Gibson & written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia
2006
139 min R
The apocalypse set to a calypso beat. Just kidding.
Mel Gibson’s latest (and least ambitious) film is part of the venerable tradition of genre movies with messages snuck into them. In this case, power and empire comes in concentric circles: “Apocalypto” opens with a tribe of Pre-Columbian South Americans harvesting a freshly-killed boar. Then the Mayans attack their village and harvest the simple tribesmen for slaves and sacrifices. Then, wouldn’t you know it, someone with even greater tools for savagery comes along to harvest the Mayans. Heads may get beaten within the course of the film, but none of them belong to the audience.
“Apocalypto” features as many sadists as “Braveheart” and “The Passion of the Christ” – “I’m gonna make him watch me wear his skin” and so forth – but at every step it seeks to humanize its main villains. Parallels are formed between the innocent tribesmen and the urbanized, villainous Mayans: the hero (Rudy Youngblood) has a strong relationship with his father, but so does the villain (Raoul Trujillo of “The New World”) with his son.
In the press Gibson has likened the film to America’s involvement in Iraq. (Let me steal the quote from http://www.accesshollywood.com/news/ah1737.shtml): “The precursors to a civilization that’s going under are the same, time and time again…what’s human sacrifice if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?” The parallels didn’t strike me as being that specific so much as referring to power and empire in general; again, this is to the movie’s credit, as a I left the theater without a hammer-wound to my head. In “Apocalypto,” poverty-line men of about soldiering age are ritually sacrificed to distract the public from a domestic drought.
The trailers make “Apocalypto” out to be all creepy, David Lynch-ian rituals, and the advance press is awash with the film’s violence. The movie doesn’t really get out of control on either count. I was also surprised by the simplicity of its story – capture, escape, revenge, rescue – and expected something more epic. Still, “Apocalypto” is gripping and visceral, and gets extra points for not giving us a date, narration, or a set of title cards at the beginning to let us know where we are and what’s going on. As the lead, Rudy Youngblood is an actor after Gibson’s own heart, hurling himself into the role and obscuring any limitations as an actor with enthusiasm and sincerity.
Gibson has shot “Apocalypto” in High-Definition Digital Video, which does him few favors. Yes, there are no and never will be any dirt or scratches. But I saw red-blue-green fringes on spiderwebs and all the credits. Sunlight is pure, blank-canvas white and, when it comes through leaves, it turns them into pixels. Images smear when the camera moves. I suppose these shortcomings are, in the abstract, no better or worse than scratches, grain, and swimming crud, but I prefer the dirt that I see in movies to be different than the dirt I can see for free on YouTube.
On the DVD commentary for his Hi-Def masterwork “Miami Vice,” Michael Mann comments that (and I paraphrase), when shooting on film, one wants to “protect the blacks,” i.e. protect very dark colors, whereas with Hi-Def one should “protect the whites” and “keep them from clipping.” I saw “Apocalypto” on my Cinemark’s digital projector; perhaps a 35mm transfer (the way I saw “Miami Vice”) might serve it better.
Finished Thursday, December 28th, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night