Apocalypto – an astounding film

January 19, 2007

3–4 minutes

I’ve always had a weakness for creative types who drink too much and have dodgy opinions. That’s why I’ve got more Jerry Lee Lewis country albums, John Ford films and Jim Davidson dvds than most people I know. Mel Gibson comes into this category of questionable characters too. His faults are well known but he has strated taking real risks with his work. He could have chosen to carry on making enormously lucrative typical Hollywood product. He didn’t. The Passion of the Christ was gory and often turgid. It was also the traditional Catholic version of the crucifixion. In common with most religious believers Gibson holds that his brand of voodoo is more right than everyone else’s. You can say it was the work of a committed, partisan film maker.

Apocalytpo is in a different league. It’s a piece of cinema like nothing you have seen before. Not just because all the dialogue is in a Mayan dialect but because it deals, whether it intended to or not, with some of the reasons the neolithic civilizations of Mesoamerica were not able to resist effectively the arrival of the Spanish.

The film’s chief protagonist is a member of a small village of hunter gatherers who subsist well in a jungle community. What the villagers don’t know is that there is a much more highly developed civilization a few days’ walk away. This urban culture has an aristocracy, a priestly caste and a proletariat like that of ancient Rome. The one thing that it lacks is animals that can provide protein in large quantities. The book Cannibals and Kings by Marvin Harris makes a convincing case that the absence of suitable animals to provide a proper dinner led to the aristocratic elite in these societies to start eating people instead. There was a hierarchy of flesh distribution which favoured the nobility , the clergy and the warriors. Wars in Mesoamerica were fought to capture prisoners not to kill the enemy since prisoners were a

source of food for the rulers.

Some reviews have criticised elements of the presentation of the sacrifice scenes as racist. This does not stand up. Look at the photo of the pyramid above. As I walked up the steps I found myself wondering why they were so steep. The answer is apparent in the film. Just in case you hadn’t died from having your heart cut out and your head cut off the tumble down the steps would definitely kill you. These sacrifices were an ingredient of the ruling ideology and were conducted in lavish public spaces. Records of public executions in England suggest that they were something like public holidays. Why would it have been different in another society?

The only Europeans are seen towards the end of the film. Wisely our hero and his family decide to move to another part of the forest. No one familiar with the history of the following centuries could infer from their appearance in the narrative that they will be a civilising influence. It’s pretty general knowledge that up to ninety per cent of some indigenous peoples would die from diseases brought from the squalor of urban Europe.

It was not only the superiority of the European weapons that allowed them to defeat the Aztecs. They built alliances with the subjugated peoples who provided them with advice, fighters and logistical support. In return they were briefly freed from the Aztecs and got centuries of germ warfare and slavery shortly after.

Damning a film because its creator holds a lorry load of objectionable views is easy but unenlightening. Criticising details of its historical accuracy is futile too. This is no documentary. It is a staggeringly intense and original bit of cinema.

(The bit about Jim Davidson isn’t true.)

2 responses to “Apocalypto – an astounding film”

maeve66

January 23, 2007 at 6:44 am

I liked it, too, though I hated giving Mel Gibson any money.

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AN

January 23, 2007 at 12:50 pm

I haven’t seen the film, as it sounds much too gory for my taste.However, in mel Gibson’s subjective intention I doubt whether he had the same interpretaion of the arriving Christians as you do Liam, given his ideology.But then again you may be right that the work communicates something unintended by the creator (This would certainly be the case with Michael Cimino’s Deer hunter and Heaven’ Gate for example, bith of which were conceived as right wing projects)

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Liam redux