Lilith Saintcrow

Usually, dear Reader, I like to accentuate the positive. This may come as a surprise to readers of the Valentine series (or even of this blog.) But really, when it comes to other people’s creative efforts I usually like to remain silent unless I really enjoyed the creative effort in question. There are enough people writing shoddy Amazon reviews out there; unless I can wholeheartedly endorse spending time and effort on a book or movie I generally like to keep my mouth shut.

I am about to break that rule with a vengeance. Consider yourself warned.

Yesterday, it being the New Year and me being in need of a little entertainment, I did something I should not have done. I went and saw Mel Gibson’s newest cinematic offering, the one that’s been showing up in previews for at least a year now. I thought–now, please, try not to laugh–that there might be some redeeming qualities to it. Seriously, I thought at least it would be visually interesting, and I’m always up for some good visual Muse food. After all, The Cell was a terrible movie (Jennifer Lopez should be ashamed of herself for ruining such stunning visual collages with her lack of acting talent, but then anyone who will date Ben Affleck is probably suffering from a severe and quite possibly congenital lack of judgment) but it had Vince Vaughn and Vincent D’Onofrio, and some of the most beautiful and eye-wateringly great visual effects I’ve seen in years. All in all, a movie best played mute, with dialogue added by one’s possibly-stoned or certainly-drunk friends. But I digress.

So I gave Apocalypto the benefit of the doubt.

I should not have.

The movie opens with a wild-tapir hunt that ends in gore. We’re introduced to Maya hunters who would feel right at home in any tailgate party, playing practical jokes on each other and doing some good old fashioned Mom-and-apple-pie red-meat eatin’. Just a bunch of dudes hanging out in the jungle, yo. They go home after bringin’ in the tapir meat (I ask you, was the testicle-eating sequence REALLY that necessary, Mel?) and party it up with the li’l women, complete with bitching mother-in-law and barefoot, pregnant, and doe-eyed wife. Ah, life in the sticks. All these guys needed was banjos.

Enter Bad Guys, a bunch of dudes from the squalid, festering city who are about to enforce their city-mouse morals on these innocent country-mouse children of Eden. The dudes from the Big City are Very Bad People, and in case we had any ambiguity on that score AT ALL, the director treats us to fifteen minutes of gore, gore, murder, gore, rape, gore, brutalization, gore, tugging-on-heartstrings, gore, gore, and did I mention the gore? Pregnant wife and aw-shucks little kid are left in a “safe hiding place”–i.e., a hole in the ground–and Our Plucky Hero, Jaguar Paw, is dragged off in captivity for a few of the worst days of his life.

The plot cobbles together bits of the Rambo and Mad Max films, although those films were done with a modicum of humanity, or at least an enjoyable lowbrow energy. Gibson now wants us to re-envision these silly plots as the grand stuff of glorious epics. Set in among the Mayan civilization, the movie opens on some scrotum jokes, and then continues with a penis joke. Our good tribe of hunters are a happy people, content to hunt and make babies and make fun of each other’s willies. But an evil tribe comes along and kidnaps all able-bodied folk, ties them up and drags them to a slave market. We know they’re evil because they cackle a lot and sneer at the misfortune of others (if they had moustaches, believe me, there would be twisting). (Combustible Celluloid)

Plucky Hero and long-suffering friends are subjected to various ordeals by Bad Guys who are cartoonish villains in Mesoamerican drag, complete with leers made more fantastical by tattoos and earplugs. Plucky Hero, it appears, has a Destiny, which is hammered into the long-suffering viewer’s ears and eyes by a number of hamfisted attempts at Foreshadowing And Subtlety. We are treated to more nightmarish gore on the way to the Big Putrid City, where, it quickly becomes clear, the heapin’ helpin’ of gruesomeness already dished up was an appetizer to the wide and varied banquet of disembowelment, stabbing, shooting, exsanguination, and ho-hum dismemberment (not to mention beheading and corpse-desecration) our humble director had in store for us.

Let’s move along with the plot, shall we? Plucky Hero is Saved From Grisly Human Sacrifice By a Fortuitous Solar Eclipse, and if the sarcasm is dripping through my capitalizations here, please be assured it’s warranted. After another utterly pointless sequence of gore (the captives, instead of being saved for a ball game or for further human sacrifice at a later date–because apparently the Mayans didn’t believe in conserving potential sacrifices they went to All That Trouble to obtain–are dragged off to be sadistically killed in pairs) the deus ex machina sets Plucky Hero free to run home to his wife and kid conveniently left in that hole in the ground (remember them?) There’s just one problem–the Very Bad Guys don’t want to let this one go, despite the OODLES of captives they’re apparently bringing in (and if we didn’t believe the oodles of captives, the mass-grave scene would have laid ALL our doubts to rest with yet more over-the-top sickening gore.)

Then it’s Plucky Hero versus the Very Bad Guys, with God (or at least a sadistic scriptwriter) on the Hero’s side. We’re treated to clubbings, drownings, knifings, massive trauma by spiked tapir-trap, death by conking yourself on an underwater rock when you’re foolish enough to dive off a waterfall–and lest you gals feel left out, there’s an underwater birth scene complete with the peril of being a) drowned like a rat in a water barrel or b) clobbered by the Very Bad Men who are chasing your Plucky Hero Husband. The fun just never ends.

The most galling thing about this waste of celluloid (or electrons, since it was shot in digital) is that it might have been faintly affecting had not the director’s obsession with messily killing people (not to mention his ham-handed Catholic preaching) interfered. After all, the jungle is beautiful and the lavish production budget gives us color-saturated vistas and extras numbering in the thousands, all painted, bedecked, tattooed, and ear-plugged, not to mention nose-plugged, to within an inch of their lives. Gibson leaves no cliche unturned in his effort to drive home that Jaguar Paw is the hero, that the guys chasing him are mustachioed villains, and that his Poor Preggers Wife (named Seven, because all the other nifty names were taken and what woman in Mel Gibson’s universe needs an independent personality OR a decent name?) is a paragon of Marian virtue and long-suffering obedience. The movie should have been visually stunning despite its director. It should have had some emotional impact.

Instead, it’s reduced to the faintly queasy feeling one gets after eating too much corn dog and seeing a bad sprint race–or a rodeo, which at least has the virtue of having no stunt doubles.

Poor Rudy Youngblood (Jaguar Paw) actually has some acting ability and a mighty fine pair of buttocks displayed to great effect in the wet loincloth he spends the entire movie in. (That’s another thing–Mel, honey, what IS your fascination with the naked male bottom? The ratio of boy booty to bazoombas in this movie is SADLY off.) Dalia Hernandez (Seven) is just aching to bust out of the two-dimensional June-Cleaver-in-the-jungle straitjacket Gibson’s put her in. (The birth scene alone qualifies her for Megatough Bitch Points. If she’d been dragged to the city, you can bet your tootsies she would have had no truck with this escape BS. She’d have taken the damn place OVER.) Jonathan Brewer (Blunted) tries to give us a great performance, but is cut off (ha ha) by the script’s unmerciful cascade of dick-jokes aimed at his character. The shaman-dude (I can’t remember his name, being bludgeoned into uncaring by the point it appears in the movie) is much more interesting than anyone in the film, being the only one with a halfway-real motivation. The Big Bad Guy, the foil to our Plucky Hero, just looks bored through his leer despite glimmers of what could be talent just yearning to breathe free.

It’s a shame to see both nascent ability and natural beauty maimed by such a lame lack-of-script overweighted with heavy, panting moralizing and even heavier blood and guts.

Now, I’m fully aware that I write books about a katana-toting bounty hunter with an itchy trigger finger and a violent life. I’ve battered my Watcher heroes (not to mention Delgado in The Society) all to hell. I even watched Kill Bill for inspiration while writing WFTD, you know. Really, violence in movies is kind of my cuppa tea. But the violence in Apocalypto isn’t even pointless. It’s beyond pointless.

Not to mention the fact that the ending is utterly, totally, completely, and in all ways lacking any shred of believability. As The Gods Are Bored and an archaeologist both point out, in one of the film’s few peaceful moments the Spaniards (read: Catholic missionaries) are shown coming ashore A GOOD THREE HUNDRED YEARS BEFORE THEY EVER SET FOOT ON SOUTH AMERICAN SAND. Ardren says it best:

But I find the visual appeal of the film one of the most disturbing aspects of “Apocalypto.” The jungles of Veracruz and Costa Rica have never looked better, the masked priests on the temple jump right off a Classic Maya vase, and the people are gorgeous. The fact that this film was made in Mexico and filmed in the Yucatec Maya language coupled with its visual appeal makes it all the more dangerous. It looks authentic; viewers will be captivated by the crazy, exotic mess of the city and the howler monkeys in the jungle. And who really cares that the Maya were not living in cities when the Spanish arrived? Yes, Gibson includes the arrival of clearly Christian missionaries (these guys are too clean to be conquistadors) in the last five minutes of the story (in the real world the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last Maya city was abandoned). It is one of the few calm moments in an otherwise aggressively paced film. The message? The end is near and the savior has come. Gibson’s efforts at authenticity of location and language might, for some viewers, mask his blatantly colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess. (Is “Apocalyto” Pornography, Traci Ardren)

Remember my rant about readers not being stupid? This movie exemplifies, with each headcrack, knifing, and over-the-top cliche, WHY I wrote that rant. Granted, the average cinema-goer goes to the movies to be entertained and in some cases anaesthetized. I plead guilty on that count–sometimes I just want to see some explosions and car chases. But when even a lush tropical setting and genuine acting talent can’t save a bundle of cliches from crashing and burning under the weight of a director’s sadism…well, I’m not entertained. I’m just faintly nauseated.

It was so bad that at the very end, when the palm leaves shut and the jungle swallowed Plucky Hero and No Longer Preggers But Still Barefoot Obedient And Doe-Eyed Wifey, I half expected blood to burst out all over the leaves after a few seconds of transparent-ploy peace. The credits came as a welcome surprise and relief, being the best part of the whole bloody movie. I left the movie theater with a sense of nausea that cannot be explained by the tub of popcorn I munched during the gore-and-brain-spattered spectacle.

I was so utterly unmoved by all the cartoonish violence that I had no trouble eating my popcorn. I was nauseated by the idiocy of the script, the utterly brainless colonialist moralizing, the ham-fisted attempts at foreshadowing, the ease with which millions of dollars was wasted on something which could have been valid in another director’s hands but which just turned out to be another reason to lampoon Mel Gibson’s self-important sadomasochism on South Park.

I’m a big fan of bad movies. I love B-movie shlock with a passion. I go to the Rocky Horror Picture Show and I devour the Evil Dead movies and I love utterly wonderful, horrible films like Reefer Madness and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes or even The Brain That Would Not Die. But Apocalypto isn’t a movie. It’s an engorged jungle snuff film. It’s two-plus hours of exploitation made even worse by the fact that it could have really meant something…if Mel Gibson had kept his goddamn mitts off it, or if he’d been on speaking terms with reality.

When we started seeing previews for this, the Selkie snorted, “Just an excuse to film The Patriot on another continent.” If that was all, it would have been mildly enjoyable despite itself. Instead, insult is added to injury and topped with bloodspatter. Will someone please revoke Gibson’s directing license and make him go hunt and gather on his own little plot of fundamentalist heaven? Preferably with someone to spank him for being a bad, bad boy, because that’s what all his “movies” seem to be asking for. Apocalypto is utterly without redeeming value in a way I thought only pornography could be.

And to think I actually paid for my ticket. Ugh.

Other reviewers might find something of value in that steaming mess. After all, it’s subtitled and in ancient Maya! That’s got to be worth something, right?

Nope. Even the subtitles and the lush greenery couldn’t save this one. It’s a shame, too, because I’d love to see this kind of resources thrown behind groundbreaking films spotlighting the complexities of indigenous peoples worldwide. What I got was a too-stupid-to-be-believed pile of violent moralizing bullcrap.

End of rant. The only advice I can offer is: cut this pile of poo a wide berth, because the stink doesn’t end when you leave the theater. Ugh.

Related posts:

1. Don’t Make Me Open Up My Can of Whupass
2. Don’t Make My Classics Toothless, Please
3. The Lonely Job, And REVIEW: Transformers aka ROBOT WHUPA$$!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 5:10 am and is filed under Rant Rant Rave, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.