|
|
 |
| |
Gore-fest from Mel
APOCALYPTO
Directed by Mel Gibson
Certificate 18
MEL Gibson is not the most popular person in film circles.
He has given us ridiculous piffle such as Mad Max, Braveheart and the mind-numbing The Passion of the Christ, and his recent drunken, anti-semitic rant seemed to be the final straw for many people who were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But if you can leave your preconceptions about Gibson the man at the box office, and take Apocalypto purely on the value of a piece of storytelling, you may be surprised.
You have to marvel at Gibson’s production values. Filmed on location, for those without a squeamish disposition it is great to look at.
Shot in the unfriendly depths of a jungle in South America, it is a great achievement to have made such a well polished film.
Furthermore, the performances are superb. There is not much of a script – the words are all in a Mayan dialect anyway – but the actors manages to portray a lot through deathly stares and flared nostrils.
The film starts with a group of hunters trapping a tapir in the jungle.
There is a certain amount of banter between the men, relating to sexual prowess. A couple of practical jokes involving tapir testicles and chillie’s are played. It is all light hearted in a 15th-century locker-room kind of way.
Perhaps the death of the tapir, graphically impaled on wooden spikes in a trap, should be a warning that this is a film ready to lurch into two or so hours of non stop blood and guts.
And lurch it does.
We see the hero Jaguar Paw, being awoken by a dog barking. He is in his hut with his pregnant wife and their young child. It is a picture of domestic bliss.
Suddenly a marauding gang from the nearby big Mayan city storm in, burn every thing, kill as many as they can and then drag others off to become human sacrifices. Paw’s wife and child are hidden in a pit and they add an alternative tension to Paw’s story, as we cut back to them through out the film to see how they are getting on in their prison.
But any tension about what Paw may be feeling in terms of his quest to escape and be re-united with his wife is smothered by the non-stop slayings, all done by arrow, spear and club.
It makes you feel a little like a spectator at the Roman Circus.
And the film has a series of ridiculous and well-worn coincidences that keep the hero alive – one trick that saves Jaguar Paw from being a human sacrifice also saved Tintin in Herge’s book Prisoners of the Sun.
Overall, whatever Gibson is trying to say about the fall of ancient civilisations and the colonisation of the Americas by Europeans, is eclipsed by the levels of gore.
|
 |
| |
|
|
|
