APOCALYPTO (2006)
“Would you like to know how you will die?”
Director: Mel Gibson
Writer: Mel Gibson, Farhad Safinia
Cinematography: Dean Semler
Editor: John Wright
Music: James Horner
Notable Cast: Rudy Youngblood, Jonathan Brewer, Raoul Trujillo, Gerardo Taracena, Fernando Hernandez, Isabel Diaz, Abel Woolrich, Dalia Hernandez, Amilcar Ramirez, Rodolfo Palacios, Bernardo Ruiz
I’ve never really cared for Mel Gibson as an actor. Outside of Lethal Weapon 2 and Hamlet, I’m hard pressed to name a good movie he’s been in (never been a big Mad Max guy, sorry). His output in the 80’s and 90’s is one cheeseball flick after another. His choice in material is lamentable. I never went to see a movie because of Mel Gibson, only despite him. I mean, look at his filmography. Tequila Sunrise, Bird on a Wire, Air America, Forever Young, Maverick, Ransom, Conspiracy Theory, Payback, What Women Want, The Patriot… you get the picture. Just writing that list makes me want to gag. And this doesn’t even get into what he’s been up to the past 15 years, starring in one schlocky low budget action flick after another. He’s the new Bruce Willis now that Willis retired.
I’ve also never really cared for him as a director. The Man Without A Face? Give me a fucking break. I know people love Braveheart, and I actually only saw it for the first time fairly recently, and it’s fine, it’s okay. I didn’t mind it, but I’ll also never watch it again. Bloated historical dramas are just not my bag. Same with The Passion of the Christ. It was okay, but ultimately whatever. Aside from his truly disturbing depiction of the devil as an androgynous woman carrying some weird adult midget baby, I barely remember anything from that movie. It just wasn’t compelling.
All’s a long way of saying I have no affinity for him as an artist. At all. I don’t get excited when I hear his name, either in front of or behind the camera. But when I found out he was making an action movie about Mayans, and that it would feature an all Indigenous/Mexican cast, and be told completely in their nearly lost language of Yucatec Mayan, I was intrigued, to say the least (a good buddy of mine growing up was from Guatemala, and we always used to joke how he was descended from the Maya, which I always thought was so goddamned cool). No way was I going to miss this bad boy. But Gibson is hit or miss, mostly miss…
And because of that fact, the 1ST 5 Minutes here are perhaps more important than other films, like eXistenZ, for example. All that film needed was Cronenberg’s name in the opening credits to get me glued to the screen. Gibson gets no such consideration. He better pull me in fast or I’m out.
1ST 5 MINUTES
The film starts with a title card that contains a quote from someone named W. Durant that reads, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Knowing a bit of Mayan and Aztec history, I am already loving this. The quote fades out and we fade into an extremely lush, green forest, in the middle of a slow push in of the camera. LOVE! Nothing occupies the frame except the dense foliage. We hear some familiar forest sounds as well as what sounds like perhaps an animal in distress.
Suddenly, from the waist down we see someone run past the camera as it continues to push in on the greenery. The image grows darker as we inch closer to the multitudes of green leaves. A butterfly serenely flutters by just as a wild boar, or tapir, runs directly at us and past the camera. Wow, what an opening shot.
We immediately cut to a chase in progress, as several tribesmen hunt the tapir, some by running behind, others by jumping down from trees. The frenetic editing combined with the elemental score by James Horner and the lush photography of Dean Semler instantly places us in a certain time and place so effortlessly it’s rather striking. After several failed attempts to catch the beast in a rudimentary net, they finally get their prey when the tapir triggers a booby trap made of sharp spikes of wood that instantly impale it.
Interesting to note here the use of bone as a tool to set their trap. Once the trap is triggered, the bone goes flying in the air, much like in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the bone is an omen of the advanced weaponry about to be conjured into a world that until then had been relatively simple. It’s a nice homage by Gibson, and evinces a nice taste level right off the bat. The fact this trap comes into play at the climax makes it all the better.
The hunters approach the impaled animal, who is still alive and suffering from the injury. We get our first look at our protagonist, Jaguar Paw, played by the great Rudy Youngblood, as he rushes up to shiv the beast in the neck, ending it’s life. The six hunters then use all their might to dislodge the tapir from the spike trap, lay it down, and cut it open. Jaguar Paw removes the heart, the liver, and the ears, and offers them to members of the group, all while one of the hunters, Blunted, played by the great Jonathan Brewer, waits anxiously to see what body part will be his. You can tell this is of great importance to him as his frustration grows with each body part he is not offered.
Finally, Jaguar Paw offers him… the balls. Blunted is not happy, seems they’ve done this to him before. Soon it becomes clear Blunted is having issues procreating, and the other hunters believe if he eats the balls, it will make him virile and produce many progeny. He takes a huge bite out of one of the juicy, bloody testicles (real barf-o-rama shit) and almost immediately starts choking on it, which sends the rest of the guys into fits of sputtering laughter. It’s a genuinely human moment. And refreshing to see characters like this, in a milieu like this, acting like a bunch of dudes busting balls in 2024.
Usually, in cinema, “natives” are either brutal savages or sage, benevolent and wise. No in between. I hate that. Humans are complex and multi-faceted. Did Mayans act like this in reality? I have no idea, but why wouldn’t they? We’re all humans at the end of the day, and we like to laugh, dance, hear stories, and enjoy our families. No reason to think these same characteristics were appreciably different 500 years ago.
Are you really taking this film off at this point? I know I’m not. Way too much good shit, from the authenticity of the make-up and hair, to the photography, to the music, to the language, to the performances, I am fully immersed and want to see where this goes, and how they’ll sustain a whole feature. This isn’t the greatest 1ST 5 Minutes out there, but it is decidedly intriguing. When watching this, how can you not be excited to see where it goes?
The rest of the flick
Brutal. That one word is really all I need to describe this flick. Just one brutality laid upon another. Sure, there are signs of hope and even levity, but the backbone of the film is brutality. Eat or be eaten. This isn’t even survival of the fittest, but survival of the “savagest.”
Apparently Gibson was attacked for making this film too realistic. Seems he offended the commies when he dared to show the natives as anything other than peace loving simple folk who lived off the land, in harmony with others and nature itself, only to be victimized by the violent white man. You see, in the commie fever dream, natives never fought each other, rival tribes never engaged in battle, and brutality was never levied for its own sake. Only once the devilish white Europeans made landfall did all those negative traits infect the natives, along with small pox and other diseases this continent never saw before. We taught them to be violent and evil.
Yes, the natives were the first humans in history not to act like all other humans who have ever existed. They say this shit with a straight face. Even now, if you Google Hernan Cortes, you get all kinds of bullshit NPR links with revisionist history. Fact is, the first-hand accounts of what Cortes and his men saw when they arrived would chill the blood of even the most hardened soldier, as human sacrifice was an integral part of the daily lives of the natives.
And it is this realistic, fact-based account that we see in Apocalypto. Unlike the commies, Gibson shows these people for who they were, the good and the bad, the innocent and the guilty, the benevolent and the savage. He treats them like human beings, and for this, he was crucified (no pun intended.) But if you ask me, this flick is as close as we will get to time travel, for it feels as if someone invented a time machine, took a camera with them, and filmed real shit as it happened. No matter whatever minor historical inaccuracies abound, this movie feels like a documentary. It feels authentic, lived in, and true to the spirit of the times depicted.
After our hunters get back to their village, we see how their lives mirror our own in some ways, from kids running around playing to a mother-in-law berating her daughter’s husband for not siring a child (the aforementioned Blunted), to a wife welcoming her husband home from “work,” Gibson paints an intimate portrait of what these people’s lives may have been like.
Which is why it is so upsetting when, the next morning, their village is raided by a cadre of men we later find out are from the Mayan city, whose rulers they either work for or do business with as independent contractors so to speak. Gibson, to his credit, does not shy away from the reality of what this type of life holds for some. And your village being raided and pillaged while the survivors are captured as slaves and sacrifices was a very stark reality back then. The emotion of this attack sequence cannot be overstated, especially Blunted’s screams as his wife is in all likelihood brutally raped and executed. It’s incredibly effective and moving.
Jaguar Paw manages to hide his pregnant wife and small son in a well before he’s captured, which will form the backbone of the “plot,” loose as it may be. And what he goes through during this sequence is rough, as he watches his father’s throat sliced open right in front of him. Dig the way Gibson cuts to a shot of the trees, from the dying old man’s POV, and there’s this weird zoom effect or something on the swaying branches, not sure what Gibson and Semler did here, if it’s in camera or an effect of some sort, but it is dope.
Which brings us to the bad guys of the flick. Wow. What a great job Gibson did with the casting here. As you know, henchmen are the key to any good action film, and here we get a veritable pot of gold. The raider that slices Jaguar Paw’s father’s throat goes by the name Middle Eye, played by the fantastic Gerardo Taracena in a career making performance. This dude absolutely nails it! From the bored, laconic way he slices the old man’s throat, to the way he nicknames Jaguar Paw, “Almost,” alluding to the fact that Jaguar Paw “almost” killed him, to the way he takes mad glee in the suffering of these people, both here and on the journey of the prisoners to the Mayan capital. He’s amazing.
And you really love to hate him. From the first frame he shows up you are just salivating at seeing this piece of shit get his ass handed to him. That is great casting. And great acting. Taracena really went for it here and it shows. What I particularly like is how Gibson takes time to give these guys little character moments, like when Middle Eye snatches a weapon from one of his fallen comrades, and says glibly, “He would have wanted me to have it.” It’s those kind of small details that really elevate this flick.
Same could be said for the leader of the raiders, the fearsome and fierce, Zero Wolf, played by the great Raoul Max Trujillo, in another career making performance. Goddamn is this guy great in this role. Dig that suit of “armor” he wears made of the bones of both animals and people he has killed. That epilet on his shoulder made of three human jaws is great design work by the costume team. Which, not for nothing, but the make-up and costume department for this film must have been IN-FUCKING-SANE! To get all these guys ready each and every day, from tattoos to hair to jewelry to loincloths and everything in between. Remarkable work.
Back to Zero Wolf, who like Middle Eye also gets his own character moments that humanize him and allow us to see him as more than just a one note monster. He has a mini arc with his son, who seems to be at the beginning stages of being a member of this raider party, and we see Zero Wolf bestow a special dagger to him in one scene, encourage the slaver in the Mayan capital to negotiate with his son instead of him, and then gives him the crucial job of “clean up hitter” in the brutal “run for your life while we lob every weapon we have to stop you” sequence. Even the guys who come and destroy your village, enslave your women, and sell you into human sacrifice have families and kids they love and want to see grow up to be successful. One particular moment I love here is when we casually see Zero Wolf doing a headcount of the prisoners, like he’s counting stock of just delivered pallets of toilet paper to Walmart. The casual and easy violence, the ambivalent attitude to suffering, the cold reality of life for these people. Really good stuff.
What’s interesting, and a relief, is how the raiders do nothing with the children of the village except cut them loose. You’re scared they’re gonna slice all their throats or take them as sex slaves or God knows what, but no, they tie up the surviving men and women, and basically tell the kids to get lost. In a truly harrowing sequence that never fails to bring a tear to my eye, the raiders are leading the prisoners across a very fast moving river that no child could cross on their own.
All the crying, upset children who’ve been following their parents are stuck on shore, and can only watch in agony. One of the mothers (Mayra Serbulo) turns back, distraught, knowing she will never see her daughter again, and the girl calls out to her, “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of them. They are mine now.” Goddamn! Gives me chills just thinking about it. And the way Gibson shoots it, with that final shot of the kids on shore, as the camera pulls further and further away from them. How are you not tearing up here? HOW?!
And then, my mind races, what on Earth are those kids going to do now? How will they survive and feed themselves? I think about how that eldest child will now be the matriarch of whatever new village they form from the ruins, and she will tell the tale of this day to her descendants. I love how we never see those kids again despite them starting their own adventure that would be just as compelling as the one we’re watching. That’s great filmmaking.
I’m not a huge fan of the cut backs to the wife and kid in peril in the well. It plays fine the first time you watch the flick, but on subsequent viewings it takes the air out of the film and the main storyline. But there are a few highlights. The first is the scene where the mother uses the mandibles of an ant to suture a wound on her son’s leg. Did they actually do this back then? Genius!
And the monkey fight in the middle of the night, holy shit is that terrifying, and then one of the rabid monkeys falls into the hole with them, necessitating the mom to club the fucking thing over the head! Amazing. One of the themes of this film, really highlighted in the main story, is about all the hidden terrors these forests have to give.
From deadly snakes, jaguars and wasps, to perilous terrain and even quicksand! As any kid who grew up in the 70’s and 80’s knows, you had an irrational fear of being trapped in quicksand a la Gilligan’s Island or some shit. Pleased to see quicksand make a comeback in such a big budget feature.
LOVE the scene where they come upon the sick little girl (Aquetzali Garcia) who is the only survivor of the disease that ravaged her village, killing everyone but her, the sores on her face a stark reminder of “the sickness,” as the raiders call it, that ran rampant back then. They use a big fallen branch to repel her and push her away as she begs for assistance with her groans. One of the raiders really gives her a shot to the chest with the stick, and suddenly the angle on her changes, shallow focus, as she stops her whimpering and looks deadly serious, right before delivering an omen to them that basically outlines everything that is going to happen the rest of the film. It’s brilliant. And due to how important that kind of shit was back then to these people, you can see some of the raiders are freaked the fuck out by it. Garcia does an amazing job here for being so young. Truly creepy scene that lingers in the mind long after the film has ended.
And now we get to the real meat of what makes this film so fucking good. The entire Mayan city sequence is bravura filmmaking on a level we usually don’t see anymore and is easily my “Favorite Scene” in the whole film. I put it in quotes cause it is really an entire sequence, but fuck it, it’s just so goddamned good you have to give me that rope. This is truly epic. I can’t imagine the difficulty of shooting all of this, not to mention outfitting all the extras, yeoman’s work, indeed.
The prisoners are led through the city until they come upon a plaza surrounded by Mayan temples, which is basically Times Square, but 500 years ago. Here we see all the levels of Mayan society, from the deformed beggars to the jade encrusted aristocrats to mystics to merchants to parrots to iguanas hanging from ropes and even a midget being carried in some sort of back harness. It’s such gonzo shit and it feels like you’re really there! Not a trace of artifice to be found.
Women with blue paint dripping from their hands approach the prisoners and start rubbing the blue paint on their faces and bodies, preparing them for something we’re not precisely sure of yet.
The female prisoners are brought to the slave auctioneer, where he promises Zero Wolf a fair price. The women are led onto a platform where they are sold to the highest bidder. They’re all auctioned off except for one. The oldest one. Who happens to be Blunted’s mother-in-law, the same mother-in-law that was berating and mocking him in front of all the others for his inability to impregnate her daughter earlier in the film. She stands on the stage, frightened, as the auctioneer tries to sell her, but there are no takers, they all say she is too old and useless, so the auctioneer cuts her bonds, and sets her free. At first she’s confused, but he ushers off the platform. She was actually spared. But was she really?
She walks toward where Blunted and the others, painted blue, are being led, and follows along with them. Her and Blunted share a silent knowingness and understanding as they walk together for the last time, her reaching out to touch him on the shoulder tenderly, with tears in her eyes. Finally, they are taken beyond where she can go, and Blunted looks back at her, and we get my Favorite Shot in the whole movie, from his POV, we track back from the old woman as she stands there, her head slowly dips down in sadness and fear, as the chaos of the city swirls around her. She was spared, yes. But now what?
Much like the children they had to leave behind, this woman must now fend for herself in THIS place of all places. It’d be like plopping someone from rural Montana into Times Square on a Saturday Night and sending them off with a “good luck!” and pat on the back. Honestly, what the fuck is this woman going to do? How will she survive this brutal new existence? Much like the abandoned children, there is a whole other tangent to the movie that is absolutely fascinating.
Gibson is a master, conceiving of this, writing and directing the absolute shit out of it. Outstanding fucking work all around. Truly. What a great scene, never fails to make me cry. Even as I type this, I feel my emotions welling up. The actors kill it. Semler’s photography nails the emotion. This is pure cinema right here.
It continues with the entire human sacrifice/eclipse scene. Surreal and insane to think it was anything close to this in reality. If so, holy fuck! Can you imagine how terrifying it must have been as one of these prisoners? Good lord. The guys are led into a tunnel where they see figures painted blue on the wall having their innards torn out, their hearts ripped out and heads chopped off.
Horrific knowing this is your fate. As they approach the temple, they see a severed head being tossed down the steps to the waiting masses who use the heads like soccer balls, who revere the blood that flows. You can see why this society was so wracked with disease and sickness, it looks putrid and filthy.
And once they’re on top of the temple, and you see what I can only describe as the Mayan royalty, a king and queen adorned in these outrageous headdresses and outfits, their insolent, lazy, fat children sitting and laughing, you’re truly transported 500 years into the past. It feels so insanely real and authentic and scary!
Gibson is expert at putting you in the frame of mind of the prisoners awaiting their grisly execution. And who is the ringmaster but the High Priest, played by the great Fernando Hernandez, who fans may recognize from Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain. He is fantastic in this, channeling none other than Benito Mussolini for his performance as he riles up the crowd for the bloodletting to come. His speech before starting the sacrifices is amazing. He plays to the crowd and feeds off their energy. The way he struts back and forth, reveling in his power as part of the elite is amazing. Hernandez really goes for it.
I love how the eclipse saves Jaguar Paw from death. Yes, it goes faster than a normal eclipse, but come on, if you let shit like that bother you, you can fuck the fuck off. This is cinema, we’re watching a movie, we can’t sit here for two hours waiting for the eclipse to achieve totality. It’s a marvelous sequence, and the lighting change by Semler is sublime. It’s interesting to note how the Mayans were quite advanced scientifically and supposedly they knew when eclipses would occur and timed ceremonies just like the ones depicted here so the masses would think these high priests and royalty had special powers and knew how to appease the Gods. Quite clever. You can sense it when the High Priest looks back at the king with a smirk when the eclipse happens, almost as if he’s saying, “see, told you it was today.”
After a harrowing sequence where the prisoners are “freed” only to be attacked with every weapon known to man as they try to run (Blunted especially has a great death here. Love the way he moves his body once the arrow pierces him, like half his body is paralyzed. It’s upsetting. Jonathan Brewer does excellent work throughout. You really feel for him as a character), Jaguar Paw kills Zero Wolf’s son and makes a break for the forest. Now that it’s personal, Zero Wolf will stop at nothing to hunt this mofo down.
The rest of the film is basically Jaguar Paw trying to stay one step ahead of Zero Wolf, Middle Eye and the rest, utilizing his wits, guile and knowledge of the forest. All of these scenes are great. Of particular note is the pit of dead people, which is difficult to watch no matter how many times I see this movie, that fucking jaguar biting that one guy’s face off (fantastic practical effect and great use of forced perspective for the shot of the jaguar chasing Jaguar Paw), another guy getting a snake bite in the neck (love how Middle Eye says, succinctly, “He’s fucked.” Reminds me of The Last Temptation of Christ and how all the apostles had New York accents. Using colloquial language to connote meaning and relatability is a master stroke), we got quicksand(!), we got Jaguar Paw throwing a nest of giant wasps at the raiders, using sharp sticks to poke a poisonous frog’s back to make deadly blowdarts. It’s so good. LOVE the shot of the raiders running through the forest at night with their torches alight. Such a great image.
The waterfall sequence is great. Jaguar Paw is forced to jump over a waterfall to escape his pursuers, and he makes it! They watch from above as he gets to shore, and triumphantly screams at them. Leads to my Favorite Line in the picture, “I am Jaguar Paw, son of Flint Sky. My father hunted this forest before me. My name is Jaguar Paw. I am a hunter. This is my forest. And my sons will hunt it with their sons after I am gone.” How can you not love the epic sweep of a line like that, what it means, the implications, the sense of immortality achieved through your lineage, a lineage that both precedes and follows your own life. The way the past and the future are tied to the present as one. Great shit.
You can sense the raiders are like, “alright, fuck this, are we done now?” but Zero Wolf is avenging his son, and orders them to go over the falls. Snake Ink doesn’t argue, but suggests they go around the falls and down another way. Zero Wolf has no time for this insolence and plunges his dagger, the one he gave his son and reclaimed upon his death, into Snake Ink’s chest, to the surprise of the other men. He goes down, and the other men all jump in turn. Middle Eye drops into the water with a devilish grin on his face, but the next guy is not so lucky and slams his head on a rock and dies instantly. Jaguar Paw can’t believe they’re still coming.
The end fight between Jaguar Paw and Middle Eye is great, a face off over a weapon on the ground, and Jaguar Paw running and sliding to pick it up and turn and swing, hitting Middle Eye square in the face. He drops to his knees. As the camera tracks around Middle Eye we see arterial blood spurting violently from the side of his head.
He again repeats the nickname, “Almost,” before Jaguar Paw takes the club and gives him a vicious upper cut, instantly killing him and sending a puff of red vaporized blood in the air. Really nice work here. Yes, the slide is a bit much, but still, how thrilling is it? And to see Middle Eye come to his deserved end. What a character. Middle Eye is easily in the pantheon of great henchmen in film history. No doubt.
Similarly, the end fight between Jaguar Paw and Zero Wolf, in the rain, is a perfect culmination of these two characters’ fates. Zero Wolf has just shot Jaguar Paw in the shoulder with an arrow, thinks he’s got him, takes out his son’s trusty dagger, ready to mete out revenge, runs toward Jaguar Paw only to trip the same trap we saw in the opening, complete with flying 2001 bone, as Zero Wolf is brutally impaled on the giant wooden stakes.
Only two of the men in the raider party remain, and they chase Jaguar Paw to the beach, where they all stop and stare out at the water. It’s only once we pan around them that we see what has them so agog.
In what was close to being my Favorite Shot in the whole picture, the pan around Jaguar Paw to reveal the four giant, wooden ships from Spain, with a smaller boat bringing Europeans to shore as the Mayans look on in shock and wonder never fails to bring that emotional hit to my eyes. It’s a stunning moment.
Gibson, Semler and the actors nail this shit. Like, what a perfect way to end a film like this. In firsthand accounts of the time, the first natives to see these ships had no idea what they were looking at, no frame of reference. They thought they were mountains moving in the sea. Literal mountains! Goes to show that if aliens ever did come to this planet, we’d have no fucking idea what we were looking at, like angels in the Bible. You ever look up what angels actually look like? Terrifying.
Jaguar Paw saves his wife and kids, and they look out at the Spanish ships and wonder what they are. Jaguar Paw says they bring men. His wife wants to know if they should go to them, and he thinks of the baby, says no, they should go to the forest to seek a new beginning.
They exit frame, leaving a static shot of the foliage slightly swaying, just like when the picture began. Fade to black on James Horner’s fantastic score. Goddamn.
What. A. Movie!
The One Sheet
This one sheet is not bad. You definitely know what kind of movie you’re getting if you see Apocalypto just based on this poster. But it doesn’t really grab me, or let us know just how sophisticated and epic this flick is. This is one of the rare posters that works but doesn’t really do anything beyond that. I could not see putting it up on the wall despite loving this movie. Not interesting enough.
And that does it for the 1ST 5 Minutes of Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s magnum opus to the Mayan civilization, it all its glories and discontents. Don’t know about you, but I love this straight action approach to history, and a history we rarely if ever see on screen, and a fascinating history at that, one very close to home.
One can’t necessarily tell how epic this flick will be in the 1ST 5 Minutes, but there’s more than enough meat there for you to keep going. Just the sheer authenticity alone, right off the bat, is intoxicating. An extremely well-crafted and executed picture. Kudos to the entire filmmaking team, it’s one of the most stunningly impressive films of the 21st century.
And you know what it has me thinking? She should have blown Gibson first. Not gonna lie.
See you in two sugar tits…