Hence his Passion-like decision to exclusively use a now rarely-heard dialect and enlist a cast of unknowns. This is all at least partly about veracity - it was, literally, a jungle out there, so why shy away from the harshness? Gibson has done his utmost to portray Mayan civilisation as accurately as the evidence will allow, and his beautifully shot recreation is impressive, from the big sets (particularly the great pyramid that looms large in Jaguar Paw’s destiny) to the tiniest details (using live ants to suture wounds). If it had been made by anyone else and released 20 years ago, Apocalypto would have been a video nasty. Within the first five minutes we witness a man eating the still-throbbing testes of a slaughtered tapir. This is graphic with a capital G - and not without its fair share of gross-out moments. One stand-out fight scene even shows the air misting crimson upon an ultra-slow-motion clash. Here we have arrows and spears puncturing flesh, beating hearts ripped from twitching bodies, brain matter exposed by an axe blow and a man having his face gnawed by a furious she-jaguar. Whatever you think of The Passion, you can’t deny he managed to construct the most effective, upsetting flogging and crucifixion scenes in cinema history. He likes it brutal, bloody and in your face. And there must, absolutely must, be at least one public execution.
Want some atmosphere? Make sure you bathe your actors in the orange, flickery glow of torchlight. Got an action scene to pep up? Shoot it in slo-mo. Need a vengeance motive? Slit someone’s throat. The film is also studded with Gibson’s filmmaking trademarks few people would have needed the poster’s announcement of authorship to realise that the director of Braveheart and The Passion was behind this.
The subtitles, meanwhile, are rife with Americanisms, one scene even strangely referencing Midnight Cowboy as Holcane chief Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo) barks, “I am walking here!” at a group of foresters, after nearly being crushed by a falling tree. He even squeezes in a mother-in-law gag or two for good measure. Keen to portray them as regular guys - they may have dangly earlobes and walk around with their butt-cheeks hanging out, but they’re just like you and me - he makes one character, the burly, insecure Blunted (Jonathan Brewer), the victim of a practical joke. His jockish sense of humour is also evident in the early scenes where he depicts the everyday life of Jaguar Paw and his fellow villagers. His Catholicism is certainly relevant, given that the people he’s portraying would eventually be decimated by rapacious followers of Gibson’s own faith, and it’s interesting that the film implies the arrival of Christians in the Americas would ultimately be a bad thing. Of course, it is ‘Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto’, and other aspects of his personality permeate. The shadow of the Holocaust does fall over the film’s second act, as our harried hero Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) clambers desperately over a mass grave, but that’s truthfully about as close as you’ll get. Yet however hard you look - and some people will be looking hard, assuming they’re willing to chuck any money Gibson’s way (and that’s a decision that should be made independently of this review) - there’s nary a trace of Gibson’s objectionable views in Apocalypto. If the ‘sugartits’ incident had happened before the release of The Passion Of The Christ, which suggested the anti-Semitic sentiment that was to be so publicly vented on July 28, 2006, then it would be relevant to discuss the two together.
This is a review of Apocalypto, not of Mel Gibson of a movie about Mayans and a civilisation on the verge of collapse, not of a drunken rant in Malibu and a reputation forever tainted. Before we plunge into the treacherous undergrowth of the Yucatán, let’s get something out of the way.