DVD Tuesday: Apocalypto -- through the past, darkly

• Jul 2, 2007 10:19 PM ET
• by Maitland McDonagh

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto: Bloodthirsty, exploitative spectacle or haunting look at a vanished world through 21st-century eyes?

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I dragged my heels to Mel Gibson's Apocalypto when it screened for critics last year: No matter how hard I tried to keep an open mind, I just wasn't interested. And I came out a convert, which is why it's this week's DVD Tuesday pick.

Now, I've read enough to know that the film mixes characteristics of different periods in Mayan civilization. I don't really care: I don't claim to be well-versed in the details of Mesoamerican culture, but I know better than to think seeing Apocalypto is a substitute for reading historical accounts. I'm also well aware that it is, first and foremost, a spectacle of the past refracted and filtered through the preoccupations of the present. What historical film isn't?

As a movie I found it enthralling though, I must caution, it took me a while to warm to it. Set what's now the Yucatan peninsula, Apocalypto begins by introducing a group of Mayan villagers who hunt and farm in the jungle, many days from the nearest city over treacherous terrain. A small hunting party kills a tapir and heads for home, horsing around and teasing one strapping fellow whose inability to get his lovely wife pregnant is the talk of the town. The mix of glossy ethnographic spectacle and Porky's-style raunch (apparently modern-day frat boys have no monopoly on juvenile pranks and vulgar male bonding) is nervy, but it worked for me: Rather than validating the stereotypes of noble savages or mystical ciphers, Gibson's depiction of the hunt and its aftermath makes the Mayan villagers seem as familiar as a bunch of construction workers or stockbrokers knocking off work and blowing off steam.

And that makes it all the more shocking when brutal chaos descends in the form of warriors from the city, who pillage, murder, rape and take prisoners. Jaguar Paw, son of the village chief, manages to secret his wife and child in a deep pit before he's captured; he and his neighbors are then force marched through the jungle by the commanding Zero Wolf and his men. When they arrive at their destination, some are sold, others prepared for sacrifice and one -- Jaguar Paw makes a daring run for it.

The film's second half is sheer man-against-himself action-adventure, as Jaguar Paw summons all his mental and physical strength to overcome of series of grueling tests of endurance, from exhaustion and injury to the outraged warriors dogging his heels. In many ways it's not so different from the new Werner Herzog-Christian Bale film Rescue Dawn, and it's genuinely thrilling. In fact, Jaguar Paw's ordeal strongly echoes those of solitary survivors in The Naked Prey (1966), Run of the Arrow (1957), The Tracker (2004) and even Italian exploitation shockers like Make Them Die Slowly (1981).

But the film is also filled with stunning images, none more so than the huge, angular Mayan city, surrounded by a blighted landscape of dying trees and the choking, poisonous limestone dust used to whitewash the walls. Whether Gibson's obvious equation of Mayan civilization at its most degenerate and 21st century America strikes you as provocative or facile, the fact that I still find the Mayan-city sequence so potently haunting speaks to its power. As to the criticism that Gibson depicts the Maya as so unrepentantly bestial that you're rooting for the Catholic Spanish (glimpse briefly at the very end) to sweep in and "civilize" them all (even if that means killing every last one), I don't buy it: I think the Koyaanisqatsi factor is much more pertinent.

In any event, I see hundreds of movies every year and rarely does one surprise me as much as Apocalypto. For me, that alone is reason to recommend it.

Things to consider:

Is it more or less distancing to make a movie set in another country in the culturally appropriate langue with subtitles or in English? Could you imagine 300 in classical Greek why or why not?

Is there a movie that really sticks with you because of the way it depicted a culture that was, in real life, completely alien (ancient Rome, the Civil War-era US, tsarist Russia) to your experience?

What do you think about using ancient, non-Western cultures to make an allegorical statement about a contemporary Western issue? Specifically -- Gibson's Mayan city sits amid ecologically blighted former jungle, drought has turned its citizens to mass sacrifice to the gods rather than practical action.

One specialist in Mesoamerican art and culture referred to the film's slave-collecting city warriors as "Orcs in loincloths" thoughts?

Previously in DVD Tuesday

Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! - Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
http:/ / community. tvguide. com/ thread. jspa? threadID= 800073953#comments"> Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases