AmP review of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto

I went to see Mel Gibson’s Apocalytpo this afternoon and, well, it is certainly not your average movie. Tortured artists produce the best art, they say, and I would have to say that Apocalypto could only be the brain child of a rather tortured soul ... it is also a great film.

First to get the important question out of the way: yes, Apocalypto is incredibly violent. But the violence is not unnecessary (as I'll explain below). The gruesome events, while somewhat stylized, are (however) realistic enough that in general the movie feels like the results of a documentary film crew getting stuck with the wrong tribe in the wrong area of the jungle during the wrong century.

Who can handle the violence? I'd personally only feel confident recommending the film to 18+ guys (and ladies only on a case-by-case basis ... the movie is intense). Personal tastes differ, for sure, but I think I have a rather high tolerance for movie brutality, and Apocalypto stretched my limits.

But to the good stuff: Going into the theater, I expected myself to be psychoanalyzing Mel Gibson himself and trying to find things that we know about his life and convictions writ-large on the screen. However, Apocalypto was so impressive a film, so compelling a story, and so realistic (as far as I know) a depiction of its subject matter that most the movie I spent thinking about the subject of the movie, and not the movie itself, let alone the director. In a phrase: I was sold.

The movie has two acts: a shorter introductory segment that introduces the characters and portrays the idyllic forest-life of the Mayans. The second act takes the viewer on a harrowing journey to the heart (pun intended) of the sickening, decaying city-life of the Mayans and an even more heart-pounding escape from the city back to the forest (as we follow the movie’s hero, Jaguar Paw).

It remains unclear in my mind exactly what fish Mel is out to fry in Apocalypto. One of the themes is very prevalent: an ecologically-conscience “closer to nature” lifestyle is better than the destructive, overly-consumptive city way of life. But the point is not quite that easily cut-and-dried (to get back to my fish analogy). One could also say, for instance, that the movie supports a family/tribe-based society as opposed to the bloodthirsty cult and slave-making/selling city setup.

In other words, the movie is best understood as a story of one man that includes various snapshots of the good and bad in the culture he inhabits. And I think one will find the “message” of the movie more easily if one gives up looking for connect-the-dots parallels with modern society and instead looks at what the movie portrays as good and bad about the Mayan culture it explores.

(*Spoiler warning* Read on if you wish, but be warned…)

What is good? Jaguar Paw’s love for his family. His relationship with his father. The honor of being his father’s son and his son’s father. The forest as the place where he gathers food to provide for his family. By extension, the other members of his village. And even – himself. His own dignity.

What is bad? Human sacrifice. Violence against innocents. Slavery. Bloodsports. And pretty much everything else we’ve come to know as evil (and widespread) in pagan cultures. Indeed, the contrast between the beauty of Jaguar Paw’s family life and the life of the city is so stark that one is left with nothing but hope that the city is torn down. The popular myth of wonderful peaceful natives being conquered by bloodthirsty conquistadors gets its unspoken but unmistakable condemnation in Apocalytpo.

And it is at this nexus in the plot that I’m putting on my papist glasses to find out what Apocalypto is about. As those who have seen the movie know, it is the arrival of the conquistadors that provides the ending twist that saves Jaguar Paw (after all his valiant efforts).

The movie constantly lets the viewer know that something is deeply wrong at the core of Mayan society – the crops are dying, there is a mysterious “sickness” beginning to claim lives, and the ruling cult of priests and kings is ravaging the peaceful boarding villages in search of sacrificial victims. This is a society, in the movie’s own quotation from Will Durant, that has “destroyed itself from within” long before it has been “destroyed from without.” Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

What causes the Mayan empire to get more and more rotten? Two things: the false notion of the gods that demands innocent blood, and the false notion of man that allows them to be killed to appease the gods. To be powerful, in the minds of the Mayans, is to kill those weaker than them. The Mayan warriors, wishing to be powerful, intentionally image their own gods as they slay, rape and humiliate the weaker villagers. The foil to their bloodlust is the honorable death of Jaguar Paw’s father. Amid all the screams and cries of his fellow villagers and in front of his very son, the father dies with the simple words “do not be afraid.” He can say this because he has a conception of the afterlife that calls for an upright life in this world. He’s a noble savage. And they don’t come much nobler.

Now, what of the most dramatic scene in the movie when Jaguar Paw is at the top of the Mayan ziggurat and his life is miraculously spared by the eclipse? Here I admit there is an obvious parallel to Mel’s Passion of the Christ, with an innocent man on a hilltop about to be sacrificed unjustly. So what can we say about it?

I could well have missed what the movie means at this stage, but here’s a try: As we know, Jaguar Paw’s death (unlike Christ’s) cannot be efficacious – his death will do nothing for his family who needs him. Before Christ has shown man the way there is no way to follow, and so the divine intervention at the top of this mountain is not to accept the sacrifice but to definitively, cosmically say no to that type of human sacrifice – God eclipses the Sun because He will only accept the Son in sacrifice. All other burnt offerings do not please Him.

I think this interpretation might actually work even better than I’ve just put it. Christ’s death was the first with power in it. Christ, in dying, killed death, as the Church fathers liked to say. But before Christ, the God of life intervenes in Jaguar Paw’s life to prevent his death and allow him to attend to his greatest duty – to safeguard his family. To be sure, Jaguar Paw will suffer whips, arrows, and everything else outrageous fortune can have in store for someone. To speak in the imagery of the movie: he is born from water at the base of the waterfall, and from earth in the quicksand pit. In each of these events God is continually giving him his life back. The God of life, while death still has its sting, keeps Jaguar Paw alive past all probability and beyond all likelihood.

What is Jaguar Paw’s reaction? In his defining moment, he turns and faces his captors and recites the same words as his father has taught him about his “father and his own father hunting in this forest” and “his son and grandson after him doing so as well.” He expresses, in the most poignant terms, an intuitive apprehension that - despite the incredible death and destruction he has witnessed, despite the pain and suffering, exploitation and debasement all around him (which we might think would shatter his hold on hope) - life is in fact the greater reality than death. The works of the wicked come to nothing. And the survival of the good man is not due to the good man's works.

This realization of Jaguar Paw's is why when the conquistadors arrive (complete with robed monk holding the cross aloft), he and his family retreat back into the forest. Their retreat does not so much mean that they are going to lack the positive possibility of encountering the gospel, but rather that they will be spared the judgement of destruction that history tells us the conquistadors visited upon the disintegrating Mayan culture. Jaguar’s family doesn’t need to be destroyed, though they do still need to be saved.

I’m a couple hundred words past the self-imposed limit I set for myself before sitting down to write this review, so I’ll cease my comments with one more point: The violence in Apocalypto is nothing more than what many Mayans, as well as countless people in human history, have witnessed or underwent. And I believe that the life-affirming message present in Apocalypto would be impoverished and weak if it didn’t have the challenging task of overcomeing the full reality of the evil that we see displayed by the Mayan empire and its minions.

Hopefully this review provided a couple themes with which the movie can be watched (or watched again) more profitably. Or then again, maybe it’s just a chase movie.

(P.S. One thing I do have to look at again is the prediction of the child afflicted with the sickness, I'm sure I'll probably be seeing the movie again within the next couple weeks and I'll be watching for it.)