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Ugh! you want my review of the blu-ray?

Posted by Jazz Inmate on February 14, 2008 at 13:18:31:
Visually and sonically striking, Gibsonâ€™s Apocalypto says more about Mel than about Mayan society
July 20, 2007

Once upon a time, the Mayans flourished. They invented elaborate art and architecture, contributed to mankind's advances in agriculture, math and astronomy and developed the only true written language native to the Americas. But watching Mel Gibsonâ€™s Apocaylpto, we mainly learn that Mayans hunted and murdered each other in the most brutal ways imaginable.

The film opens with an eerie vocal while we read the words of historian/philosopher William Durant: â€œA great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.â€ Viewers hoping for a serious exposition on this thesis are soon disappointed. Apocalypto quickly degenerates into a celebration of pain, dismemberment and death that speaks to Gibsonâ€™s vision, not Durantâ€™s.

At one point, prisoners tied to a tree trunk are walking along a precipice. The last man in the line is near death and his legs give out, swinging him over the cliffâ€™s edge and jeopardizing all the men tied to the trunk. The captors can easily save their prisoners, but a cruel leader says, â€œWait. Letâ€™s see what happens.â€

This voyeuristic perversion is the true thesis of the movie: let's put people in horrifying situations where their lives hang in the balance, and watch what happens in excruciating detail. That these people are Mayan seems almost irrelevant. Gibson's facial expressions and vocal inflections are stamped all over the unknown actors. In the end, the characters seem the same as in any Lethal Weapon movie--distinguished only by different costumes, sets, weapons and language (the film was in Mayan, with English subtitles).

I appreciate the gangster carnage in Sopranos, the gunslinging swagger of Unforgiven and even the modern warfare blood and guts of Black Hawk Down. But where David Chase shows the unpredictability of violent eruption, where Eastwood shows the machismo of might makes right and where Scott shows the harsh reality of war, Gibson shows something else: unflinching inhumanity. Gibson has no redeeming quality there.

Watch the way the more gifted directors choose to frame the action and then watch Apocalypto. Not once does Gibson shy away from showing a scourging or bloodletting. If you follow the camera, you know what is coming. Why force the viewer to see every detail? And it is not simply the glee with which Gibson captures an injured or dying character. Mel amplifies the carnage with excess: a cracked skull rhythmically gushing blood; a spewing heart still beating after being ripped from the murdered victim's body.

Where a gifted director like Hitchcock would show blood swirling down a drain, Gibson celebrates it pouring out of the human body in unrelenting detail. Granted, Hitchcock's time was more than 40 years ago and now we are in a different time. But in following a man going over a waterfall, most directors would simply show the water without the man emerging from it. Or at most, the water turning a bit red. The audience gets the message that way. What does Gibson show? He gets an underwater camera and indulges in the man's skull cracking against rocks, with blood diffusing into the water.

Most disturbing about Gibson's films is not the technical focus on blood and guts, but the overarching focus on death over life. In his film prior to Apocalypto, Gibson cared nothing for the life or message of the most influential figure of the past 2000 years, but he cared a great deal about the death. Mel missed an opportunity to explore the teachings of love, peace and forgiveness central to the subject.

Similarly, in Apocalypto, any number of focal points in Mayan culture could have been meaningfully explored, while still yielding a violent adventure. Instead, we get a film that explored the very worst of that civilization, in the most superficial and sadistic way.
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"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back." -Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982)