MOVIES .

This Is the End

Society goes down for the count in Apocalypto.


	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Dec 6, 2006

To hear Mel Gibson tell it in his very earnest promo spots, beginnings follow endings. This construction seems to fly in the face of conventional narrative logic, but don't be fooled. Though Apocalypto's dialogue is in ancient Mayan dialect, it is in other ways profoundly orthodox, a chase movie featuring grim-faced villains in hot pursuit of a beautiful hero. The fact that the hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), must also save his pregnant wife and baby boy only makes him more beautiful.

Something of a precursor to Max Rockatansky, Jaguar Paw has to manage his chase on his feet — no turbo engines or need for gasoline. As Gibson attests, his route is circular: Dragged from his tranquil, leafy-wet village to a desiccated, rotting hull of a kingdom, Jaguar Paw's remarkably athletic determination carries him and his assailants back around to the village. In a less lunk-headed movie, such looping might be thematically on point, but here it just emphasizes that the plot leads exactly where you know it will.

Jaguar Paw begins his saga in midchase, as he and his fellow hunters track and kill a tapir, using an ingenious and brutal method. Once the animal is whacked through its middle with spikes, they laugh and congratulate each other. When it comes time to pass around the choice body parts, they give the tapir balls to poor Blunted (Jonathan Brewer), legendarily unable to get it up for his loving wife, not to mention her loudly discontented mother. When he attempts to follow the ritual Jaguar Paw describes, eating the balls raw, Blunted gags as his fellows are beside themselves with glee. How grand it is to be raunchy, rowdy young men!

The "fear" soon puts the kibosh on such good fun: Jaguar Paw's crew espies the remnants of a neighboring tribe, bedraggled and sad-faced, not mentioning what's beset them, only that they are in search of (wait for it) a new beginning. Jaguar Paw's dad warns him not to succumb. "Fear is a sickness," he declares. "It has tainted your peace already... Strike it from your heart." Um, too late.

The villains arrive en masse and in the dead of night, raping women, burning down thatch homes, and dragging off bloodied men for use in ritual sacrifice (they mean to save their own civilization, besieged by illness and famine, not to mention fat and selfish royals). Jaguar Paw earns the particular wrath of two Holcane warriors, Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo, wearing human bones, feathers and a big-cat jaw, making him seem the ancestor of Roa

OUT IN THE JUNGLE: Rudy Youngblood (center) as Apocalypto's fighting Mayan.

d Warrior 's Lord Humungus) and Snake Ink (Rodolfo Palacios). Though they're warned repeatedly that their reign is doomed — once by a young girl afflicted with "the sickness," who, despite being poked by a stick wielded by a huge and fearful warrior, calls out to beware the signs, as when, for instance, "The day will be like night." Receding into the distance as the camera walks away from her, the girl's voice carries and her face is marked by oozy sores, exemplifying the literalism that beleaguers Apocalypto. If no one knows exactly how and why the Mayans came undone — assuming the arrival of the Spanish explorers didn't do it in one fell swoop — this film offers up an assortment of explanations, material and spiritual. (See here the Will Durant quotation that opens the film: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.")

Jaguar Paw's adventure runs rather parallel to this collapse. His initial paralysis is rendered sympathetic by the spectacle before him. The Holcane priests cut out their sacrificial victims' hearts then lop off their heads, all atop a great pyramid overlooking the town square, such that the heads bounce and thud down the pyramid steps, while the crowd cheers wildly. It's an atrocity so stunning it's not instantly recognizable, even eliciting laughter at the screening I attended.

But even as Apocalypto contemplates such horrors, it also loves sheer physical spectacle. Shot by Dean Semler, the film is, frame for frame, gorgeous as well as pretty well relentless. Once Jaguar Paw escapes the Holcanes, he becomes capable of incredible feats. Like the family-loving, vengeance-driven Mad Max, Martin Riggs, Tom Mullen, William Wallace and Benjamin Martin before him — all Gibson action heroes — he is driven to save someone. In this case, his good cause is his family, pregnant wife Seven (Dalia Hernandez) and their young son, whom he has hidden from the marauders in a currently empty well (a rainstorm approaches, upping the perilous ante).

Most emphatically, the chase plot provides for the spectacle of bodily abuse, so repetitive in Gibson's films. Jaguar Paw takes the pain, brings the pain, and then underlines the pain again, in order that his extraordinary feats of derring-do might be understood not as mere movie reiteration (the film quotes The Fugitive, Predator, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, among others), but as a broadly self-congratulatory assumption of origins. No matter that Gibson and company did not, in fact, get here first.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Apocalypto

Directed by Mel GibsonA Buena Vista releaseOpens Friday at area theaters