WARNING: review contains plot spoilers!

Mel Gibson sucks….

And why? Well, of course because he holds questionable ideas (and certainly his father does), and because his newest movie sucks too.

I went to Mel Gibson’s new movie Apocalypto last Saturday, with my Friday-evening-friends. And was not impressed. The only thing remarkable about the movie is that it is completely spoken in Maya, not a word of English. For the rest, it is one long chain of perversive cruelty and cliché. Mel Gibson seems to have something with cruelty. It makes you worry.

Moreover, the script is meagre. It has some stupid mistakes, and is very cliché. And speaking of cliché: it has the worst ending ever.

Basically, the script is divided in these parts:

Part 1: Idyllic Happy Jungle Village with happy noble savages. Although they speak Maya, the main actors all appeal to western notions on physical attractiveness.

Part 2: Raid by cruel barbaric warrior raiding party, lots of violence, hero sees father murdered, needs to leave preggers wife behind (sob sob…). “I’ll come back honey!“.

Part 3: Prisoners on transport to Maya city: Abu Ghraib, Maya style

Part 4: Mass Apocalyptic scenes in the Maya city, with hearts being cut out from life prisoners, heads being chopped off and bouncing off pyramid stairways under cheers of spectators…. Hero is saved from this grim fate by a solar eclipse (does Mel Gibson read Hergé?!?). Then survives being used as life target for shooting practise. Escapes into the jungle, wounded.

Part 5: The Hunt: Rambo, transformed to a Maya context. Long chase through the jungle. Hero decides to fight back, using his hunter-gatherer skills. Lures head of chasing unit into the Tapir trap (gory empalement scene). Shoots other with makeshift poison blowpipe darts (McGyver, anyone?!). Dramatic one-on-one armed fight in which he defeats main “cruellprit” from parts 2 & 3 (I bet you didn’t see that coming! Yes, this is sarcastic…).

Part 6: Saved by the Bell….and this really is the most disappointing part. Chased by his last two surviving adversaries, he runs onto the beach and there…no, I won’t spoil the surprise…but here, at this point, I decided it really, really is a butt-movie, with a butt-script (“butt”, as in “buttocks”).

Most obvious toe-curling blunders in the movie:

1. Conceptual: The ending of the chase scene.

2. Bad homework: One night after the solar eclipse, it is full moon. Solar eclipses happen at new moon.

3. Conceptual/bad homework: Village of hero is much too close to Maya city (a day or a two day jungle chases distance) to be out of its normal influence sphere.

6. Bad homework: course of solar eclipse is much too fast. First contact is when hero is put on sacrifice altar, totality when priest takes up sacrifice knife. It just doesn’t happen that fast.

And if you know your Maya stuff, there’s a lot more.

In reality, the large majority of people wouldn’t pick up on even one of the ‘blunders’ in the film.  Few people have a comprehensive knowledge of mayan culture.

That’s true of course.

That is why movie makers can get away with revising history and then over time their depicted version of history becomes the popular belief of the way things actually happened, when it is really anything but true.

Remember how movies twist history.  One of my son’s favorite movies is
The Mummy which has everyone speaking ancient Egyptian including the modern characters.  Since Egyptian is a centuries dead language that we only know how to translate b/c of the Rosetta stone, we don’t know how it was spoken.  Since Maya culture is probably more popular culture obscure than Egyptian, of course we don’t know as much.  This is such an important part of the culture of the Americas, it is a shame that it is not more learned about

I am an ex associate - 17 January 2007 05:03 PM

Remember how movies twist history.  One of my son’s favorite movies is
The Mummy which has everyone speaking ancient Egyptian including the modern characters.  Since Egyptian is a centuries dead language that we only know how to translate b/c of the Rosetta stone, we don’t know how it was spoken.  Since Maya culture is probably more popular culture obscure than Egyptian, of course we don’t know as much.  This is such an important part of the culture of the Americas, it is a shame that it is not more learned about

Hmmm, I think we may actually have some idea of how ancient Egyptian (which of course begs the question of which type of ancient Egyptian, but we’ll ignore that for now) might have been pronounced due to transliterations into other languages that we do know of.  I’m not sure of this, though; I’ll have to check around and see.

One of my favourite bits in Stargate (the movie), was that Dr. Jackson couldn’t make himself understood because his Egyptian ‘accent’ was so bad.

Both Stargate and The Mummy used Stuart Tyson Smith (a real Egyptologist from UCSB) to write the Egyptian dialogue.

—

If anyone’s really interested (and no-one ever is), I recommend “How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs” by Mark Collier (University of Liverpool) and Bill Manley (British Museum). [Amazon Link]

Ugh!  I absolutely refuse to see that movie.  The only thing that surprises me is how many people did.

Razela - 18 January 2007 08:53 AM

Ugh!  I absolutely refuse to see that movie.  The only thing that surprises me is how many people did.

Well it’s not one of Kurt Russel’s best, I’ll admit.

Now you are making me want to see it just to know for myself.

It may be remembered as the “truth” but the movie had several errors I think.

The Spanish conquerers in Mexico defeated the Aztecs not Mayans.

There were no total solar eclipses of the sun in Mexico in the 20 years before and during the Spanish invasion.

Poisonous frogs are in South America not Mexico

Nice research Hoxam.  oh, and welcome to the forum.