Underrated Classics: APOCALYPTO!

Not being Catholic or a woman, I’m not particularly a Mel Gibson fan. The Lethal Weapons always seemed slightly too dated to be considered amongst the likes of Die Hard, and Braveheart sucks, not to mention the fact that The Passion of the Christ raises far too many issues to cover here, very few of which are good.

It’s comes as something as a surprise then to find myself recommending Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto as an underrated classic. Many of you may not have seen it (I hadn’t until recently), and yet it fully deserves to be among the pantheon of the greatest films of the past few years.

What other recent huge-budget blockbuster has featured babies being thrown against trees, opens with a boar being horribly speared, has a woman giving birth in a pit, and is entirely in a Mayan dialect? This is what makes Apocalypto brilliant – its bravery.

Frankly, it’s a surprise that it got made at all, for it must have had some extremely confident backers and distributers. And thank goodness they were, because the individuality of the film is evident from the outset. The story concerns the last days of the Mayan civilization, an eminently violent and spectacular society whose leaders feel that their decline can be halted by human sacrifice. Jaguar Paw, a young man captured for sacrifices, must escape his fate and rescue his pregnant wife and child before the rains come. Gibson’s artistry is beyond doubt – the richness of the gold-plated Mayan temples and the chaos of the slave marketplace juxtaposed with the simple life of hunting and spirituality of village life. We see simple folk doing simple things – passing on relics to family members, playing jokes on each other, settling down to a quiet night in the huts – which adds a depth of character that films like Gladiator miss. There is a real sense that this is a real world in which people lived, a real society about to come to an end, and one that is brought to life in as authentic a way as possible.

This being a Mel Gibson film, there are huge amounts of uncomfortable violence. The human sacrifices in particular, with live victims having their hearts torn out and their heads chopped off, are for once in a Gibson film completely necessary – this was a violent an primitive society, based around superstition and completion, and such brutality only adds to the sense of wonder in what at times feels almost like a very, very old documentary.

Yet what Gibson manages to achieve so successfully is a real sense of pace and tension lacking from his earlier efforts. The jungle through which Jaguar Paw is hunted is both his home and his worst enemy, switching wildly between the two. Subsequently, we never quite know whether he is in mortal danger or whether it is his pursuers that need to watch out. The film opens at a breakneck pace with a boar hunt through the jungle, a definite signal of things to come. Apocalypto could even be seen as a Mayan version of The Fugitive – excellently cranked tension, complete with waterfall scene, eventually released in satisfyingly brutal fashion. As the Mayan civilization’s doom looms large over the final scene, there is a real sense of tragedy, of a time and a people long forgotten to history, crushed under the weight of Western invading forces, reduced to barely a memory and some crumbling relics.

What Apocalypto achieves so breathtakingly is to remind us of where we came from, of how diverse the human condition has been over the millennia. Within the ancient cultures that we read about there were real human stories of tragedy, love and family, all lost to the mists of time, and yet so akin to ourselves. That this is all achieved in so hugely entertaining and spectacular a fashion by the man who won an Oscar for the film in which he spend most his time with his face painted and flashing his arse is nothing short of mind-blowing.