Every criticism of Mel Gibson as a person is valid. He’s racist, homophobic, sexist, and anti-Semitic. By any conceivable metric, he is a piece of shit. This isn’t the place to litigate Gibson. That job has been done. And I don’t remember how I wound up with a copy of Apocalypto. The fact is, when you cover film – or TV, or music, or literature – you’re going to end up discussing the work of terrible people. I covered Roman Polanski the first year of 31 Days of Fright, and I’ll eventually have to cover Woody Allen for Every Best Picture. So let’s just accept the fact that Gibson is a terrible person who just happens to be very talented as a director. I don’t like it any more than you do! God, who wants to cover such thorny material in 2020? Certainly not I, but here we are.
Gibson – and we’ll talk about him as a filmmaker from now on, having addressed his horrible failings as a person – is prodigiously talented, as good as anyone else behind a camera at building an immersive, experiential world, and plummeting his audience into it. To borrow a term from a very popular podcast, Apocalypto is a classic blank check movie; who else at this stage in his career would film a nearly two-and-a-half-hour long movie without single word of English spoken? The Passion of the Christ was all in Aramaic, and it made half a billion dollars at the box office; Apocalypto wasn’t quite as profitable, but that should not be seen as an indicator of its (or any film’s) level of quality. At its best, Gibson’s film feels like David Lean by way of Werner Herzog, and it truly ranks among the best of film about the heartlessness and inscrutability of the jungle, films like James Gray’s The Lost City of Z or Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
The story is deceptively simple, only seeming complex on its surface due to the film’s dialogue, spoken entirely in Yucatan Maya. We follow a young hunter named Jaguar Paw, whose village is attacked. He and his fellow men are forced into captivity and slavery, while he stashes his pregnant wife and son at the bottom of a hole. Without him there to pull them out, they will drown with the first rain. The ticking-clock tension of Gibson’s film is enough to add urgency even without the frank depictions of atrocitities.
Much like all of Gibson’s work as a director, Apocalypto is not for the faint of heart. The very first scene shows Jaguar Paw and his compatriots hunting a tapir, which they dismember in stark, brutal fashion. Put simply, if you don’t want to watch a jaguar eating a man’s face, this is not the film for you. The violence is quietly astonishing, and Gibson never makes a meal of it: this is just how these things look. When Jaguar Paw strikes a man across the head, we see the man’s brain poking out from the hole in his skull, blood lazily geysering out of the wound. It’s horrific, but Gibson is not aiming for exploitation here.
As Jaguar Paw, Rudy Youngblood is exceptional: frightened and determined, a hunter outclassed by warriors with only his will to fortify him. The whole cast is terrific, all Mayan or Native American actors, none of whom would be well known to the moviegoing public. Gibson wants to disorient us, and he does, which makes the horror of the film that much more effective. There are some truly horrific sequences in Apocalypto, although some are marred by an over-reliance on slow motion.
At its best, this is a film that will grip you by your heart and squeeze. Epic and intimate in equal measure, with some truly breathtaking displays of violence and ferocity. Apocalypto is a great achievement by one of the worst people in Hollywood.
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