Have you seen it? We "saw" it Saturday. I use that term loosely because my wife had her eyes closed through 3/4 of it... or more. I thought it was an interesting premise for a major movie and I did enjoy the underlying theme and cinematography but I guess I was too distracted being concerned for her. I even offered to get up and leave but she declined.
Too much blood and gore. She said, "I went to be entertained, not grossed out!" If that was an actual representation of the Mayans then I'd think it was appropriate but I just don't know that although I want to look into it. Having taken the tour of Chichen Itza and walked around some of their other pyramids and temples, I know they did do sacrifices, just don't know if it was as frequent or as large a part of the society as depicted in the movie. In any case, it was pretty bloody.
At least until the next time he gets drunk and starts bashing spaniards.
I haven't seen the movie yet and have heard that it is pretty violent and gory. That being said, how big a deal would that be if the producer wasn't Mel Gibson?
There are several movies I hope to see after the semester ends and this is definitely one of them. Borat is not.
Is this film supposed to be an accurate portrayal of the decline of the Maya?
The last bit of anthropology I read concerning the Maya stated that nobody knows for sure why their culture collapsed much less more particular details of their daily life.
Mel seems to have found his niche in historical fiction with Passion and now this. That said it does look interesting.
__________________
Working "hard," or the perception of working hard, doesn't really mean anything. Sweating, vomiting, and breathing hard could be a good workout or a tropical disease kicking in.-Dan John
__________________
Working "hard," or the perception of working hard, doesn't really mean anything. Sweating, vomiting, and breathing hard could be a good workout or a tropical disease kicking in.-Dan John
I definitely want to see it, but from what I hear, its message is a dangerous throwback to imperialistic racism.
Here's a good review from a Mayan archaeologist. My politically correct alarms started going off when I first started reading the review, but once you grasp her main point, it's a good one, and well justified.
A scholar challenges Mel Gibson's use of the ancient Maya culture as a metaphor for his vision of today's world.
Traci Ardren, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, knows the Maya well. She has studied Classic Maya society for over 20 years while living in the modern Maya villages of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Espita in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Her credentials include contributing to and editing Ancient Maya Women (2002) and The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica (2006). Ardren's reaction to the new film "Apocalypto," follows. Scholars are well aware that some aspects of Maya culture were violent, but Ardren finds fault with what she sees as a pervasive colonial attitude in the film.
With great trepidation I went to an advance screening of "Apocalypto" last night in Miami. No one really expects historical dramas to be accurate, so I was not so much concerned with whether or not the film would accurately represent what we know of Classic period Maya history as I was concerned about the message Mel Gibson wanted to convey through the film. After Jared Diamond's best-selling book Collapse, it has become fashionable to use the so-called Maya collapse as a metaphor for Western society's environmental and political excesses. Setting aside the fact that the Maya lived for more than a thousand years in a fragile tropical environment before their cities were abandoned, while here in the U.S, we have polluted our urban environments in less than 200, I anticipated a heavy-handed cautionary tale wrapped up in Native American costume.
What I saw was much worse than this. The thrill of hearing melodic Yucatec Maya spoken by familiar faces (although the five lead actors are not Yucatec Maya but other talented Native American actors) during the first ten minutes of the movie is swiftly and brutally replaced with stomach churning panic at the graphic Maya-on-Maya violence depicted in a village raid scene of nearly 15 minutes. From then on the entire movie never ceases to utilize every possible excuse to depict more violence. It is unrelenting. Our hero, Jaguar Paw, played by the charismatic Cree actor Rudy Youngblood, has one hellavuh bad couple of days. Captured for sacrifice, forced to march to the putrid city nearby, he endures every tropical jungle attack conceivable and that is after he escapes the relentless brutality of the elites. I am told this part of the movie is completely derivative of the 1966 film "The Naked Prey." Pure action flick, with one ridiculous encounter after another, filmed beautifully in the way that only Hollywood blockbusters can afford, this is the part of the movie that will draw in audiences and demonstrates Gibson's skill as a cinematic storyteller.
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.
Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamucil this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in "Apocalypto," no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities. Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-1990s. To see this same trope about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. How can we continue to produce such one-sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World?
I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people, who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic. It is surely no surprise that "Apolcalypto" has very little to do with Maya culture and instead is Gibson's comment on the excesses he perceives in modern Western society. I just wish he had been honest enough to say this. Instead he has created a beautiful and disturbing portrait that satisfies his need for comment but does violence to one of the most impressive of Native American cultures.
Traci Ardren is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami.
I have a very strong stomach, and The Passion was one of two films I have seen that went way over the top for me in gruesome imagery. The other was Hannibal. Even Brave Heart didn't get to me the way these two films did.
I didn't see it in that context at all. It appeared to me that the central theme involved the urban Maya preying on the peaceful jungle villagers and harvesting them for slaves and sacrifices. There is some undertone that the human sacrifices (shown up close and personal, in gory and graphic detail) are a perverse waste of human lives.
There is some indication that the main character, Jaguar Paw, is fated through prophecy to be "special" in some manner but I took that as ordinary Hollywood claptrap to propel the story.
There is NO indication that the ship seen near the end contains missionaries. There are no priestly robes; the people seen at a distance appeared to be wearing ordinary clothing for the 1500s. I don't recall any reference in the script to their bringing "salvation." All they talked about was that it brought tumultous change -- which it did, although to the Aztecs and not the Maya.
Of course it didn't go into detail about the accomplishments of the civilization. It's a movie, not a documentary. It's no more historically accurate than Shakespeare in Love or any other movie of that type.
Anytime someone starts preaching that a film is "dangerous" that usually tells me they're serving an agenda and really don't think of anything as entertainment.
__________________ The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same. -- Carlos Castaneda
Last edited by RacerBill : 12-15-2006 at 12:57 PM.
Reason: correct spelling
There is NO indication that the ship seen near the end contains missionaries. There are no priestly robes; the people seen at a distance appeared to be wearing ordinary clothing for the 1500s.
Au contraire, I do remember seeing a priest in the boat on the right (from our perspective) clearly dressed as such. Am I remembering wrongly? Am I being brain washed by evil conspiracy theorists??? :p
I didn't see "The Passion..", JFK, etc etc. There is a serious problem when someone with issues rewrites history. The four gospel stories of the passion are about torture and death, but NONE of them make any claim that the suffering of Jesus was amongst the worst that humans have endured. Most of us Christians take to story of the passion as, amongst other things, a tract against torture and death.
There are a number of Christians who are turned on by stories of death and torture, to the point that they have encouraged death and torture. Most of the former Christians find the later group of Christians psychologically compromised. From my reading of reviews about Mel's Passion I put him in the later group. And no, I am not willing to see the movie myself, you would probably not be willing to read my lengthy review of it, my only excuse for watching it.
Au contraire, I do remember seeing a priest in the boat on the right (from our perspective) clearly dressed as such. Am I remembering wrongly? Am I being brain washed by evil conspiracy theorists??? :p
It's entirely possible I missed that.
But did you get the impression that this was a boatload of missionaries? Or that the movie focused on them bringing "salvation"? If that's truly the message that Mel was trying to get across, it went way over my head. And, for that matter, it didn't get noticed by any of the movie critics I've read on it.
__________________ The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same. -- Carlos Castaneda
Apocalypto
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