Apocalypto

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Summary:
Jaguar Paw and all in his village are razed by some evil Mayan warriors/assholes. They're taken hostage to a long journey into the unknowns, only to find their fate to be totally fucked.

Review:
Mel Gibson is a talented director. Braveheart is one of my favorite movies. Man Without a Face is passable fair, but considering what kind of movie it is (sappy, stupid melodrama about "the beauty inside one's self") it's a LOT better than I anticipated. Passion of the Christ... well, that was a sad attempt at well-framed moments with the actors posing as if they're in a classic portrait for two and a half hours... with lots of torture that I slept through due to my jet lag at the time. It obviously was well received by many others, though! It raked in the cash as if the End Draweth Nigh, and the viewers' only salvation was believing in Our Lord Jesus Christ on a big screen at a multiplex near you!

Apocalytpo, first and foremost, is gory. It's not horror movie, it merely has many moments of overkill. You think someone - or something - should be dead, and yet they keep hacking away at it! And hacking! This made me laugh a LOT during the movie. Oh, and there are decapitated heads rolling down mayan temple steps, which is cool. One of my favorite shots in the entire film is the angle taken from the persepective of the head being ripped off the body. Shaky cam and all! I laughed AGAIN!
I think this is one of the funniest movies of the year. I was actually thinking that this movie would have more carnage from opening to close, and even though there's a fair amount of it, things don't end up being as bloody and senseless as my preconceived notions. At the same time, there was a LOT of violence once it kicked in, especially in the last half hour, which was a laugh riot for me. All the shit going down was acceptable within the boundaries of realism, and then there's a moment underwater at the very end which I won't divulge here to save spoilers... however, this moment underwater was so fucking FUNNY and OUTRAGEOUS that it was the ultimate reminder of the fantasy world this movie lives in!

In terms of acting, and the storyline itself, I'd say things were done well. The beginning consisted basically of making fun of the fat guy that can't conceive children. The whole entire village ridicules him, and I was thinking he was going to go Gomer Pyle on their asses, pull out a 7.62 Full Metal Jacket from his hut and gun them all down. But that didn't happen. During all of this ridiculing, you're hoping for all the villagers to die, which is a great way to prepare us for the evil events within the next 20 minutes. It is always a sad thing to see a well-meaning group of people to be killed, raped and pillaged by the heartless bad guys.
Apocalypto did its best to show that even the evil overtakers of these small villages are human beings, doing what they feel is justified. There's the asshole soldier who likes to treat Jaguar Paw and Friends like lowly animals, as if he's a child dissecting frogs in his backyard. The rest, though, are people with families, ambitions and the need to do right to their God. They rape and pillage not because they're inherently evil, but because they're soldiers. Like the Blues Brothers would say, they're "On a Mission from Gah-d". Now, I could make plenty of allusions to current day society, even several cultures from around the world and how the actions of the people in this movie parallel current day religious and/or military fanatical leaders... but I won't. I'm watching this movie to be entertained, not to try to receive some shitty "message".

I really did laugh a LOT at the extreme measures taken to disturb the audience with the violence. Plus, a lot of the action was exciting, in a way that Last of the Mohicans failed me. Think of Magua and Daniel Day-Lewis on the moutaintop, and you have an idea of many moments within Apocalypto. I will admit that I was one of the only people laughing at a lot of the movie. Sorry, but I really thought it WAS funny. This isn't a bad movie, though, and it wasn't campy. It played itself pretty seriously, and in my opinion, the gore was meant to disturb. BECAUSE it was meant to disturb, I found it exploitive, therefore humorous.
I still highly recommend this movie. It's entertaining most of the time, well filmed, with a really cool setting, and an interesting enough storyline to boot. You want a revenge/action/thriller with freakish humans looking almost like George Lucas' Episode Four rejects? Check out Apocalypto!!!

GRADE: B

TRIVIA:
- Mel Gibson got drunk and said that Jews were the cause of all the wars in the world. Does that mean he thinks Mayans were Jews?

- If so, then his idea of world history is really fucked up!

Reviewed: 12/16/06