Apocalypto
dir. Mel Gibson

"Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, they enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."
- Col. Walter E. Kurtz

"Good people do good things; evil people do evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
- Richard Dawkins

They say you should judge all art on its own merits, free of the political baggage of the artist or time. On that score, Apocalypto is a lavishly produced, but ultimately bland and disappointing action film.

The first two parts of what one might call the "story" create an interesting, if somewhat overdrawn, premise. Jaguar Paw's village is destroyed by marauding Mayan warriors, his child and pregnant wife are stranded in a cistern, he and his friends are captured and put under forced march to a giant temple where human sacrifices are performed.

We can't help but ask ourselves, who are these people? How did they come to this extraordinary practice? What are the politics involved? How are victims chosen? What is the history of this practice? And so on.

The third part of the story devolves into a Rambo-esque chase through the wilderness as Jaguar Paw escapes and picks off his relentless pursuers, whose loyalty to their Rumsfeldian leader at times strains credibility. Here's an idea: kill your leader, let Jaguar Paw go and call it a bad day.

It's as though the storyteller dangled this tantalizing theme under our noses and then just chucked it into a pit. Throughout I found myself perplexed. Mel Gibson is not known for turning his attention away from the core of his stories.

When you bring the Mel Baggage(tm) into it, the monumental artistic failure of Apocalyto becomes glaring.

Here we have a hero confronted by a priesthood reveling in bloody human sacrifice to appease their vindictive gods. Comparisons to the passion (and The Passion) are almost unavoidable. Why is this religiously motiviated human sacrifice a sign of civilization in decay but the crucifixion is the redemption of all mankind?

Christians say Jesus was the son of God. The Mayans say the gods require human sacrifice to be appeased. Why are we right and they're wrong? Even with the arrival of the Spanish fleet, sailing under the sign of the cross, this juxtaposition of sacrifices is left utterly unexplored.

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

This quote from Will Durant opens the film, yet there is nothing to indicate what the internal destruction of the Mayans was. Nor is there any indication that good, pure living would have spared them from the tender mercies of the Spanish.

Durant's quote might apply to civilizations in near proximity to each other, where weakness invites invasion. But when a technologically advanced civilization with guns and ships and regimented armies encounters a primitive culture, well, the odds are not good.

Durant's quote does not imbue the film with a sense of warning for our times, our souls, our selves, but rather as a blame-the-victim justification for Native American genocide. As with the clear anti-Semitism in The Passion, this overwhelms the artistic intent.

Several other intriguing themes are introduced only to be given scant or no exploration. Mankind's insatiable thirst for power and knowledge, told as an Eden-esque parable of animals by a village elder, the projection of this insatiability onto the bloodthirsty gods, the dreadful impact fear can have on a, for lack of a better word, brave heart, the stewardship of the land over generations. Each of these ideas is presented and abandoned as though Gibson did not know, or was not willing to face, what his story was really about. At each turn, it is as though Gibson stepped to the edge of his artistic abyss, and then turned away without looking in.

How does the fear of the Mayan-oppressed native tribes relate to the damnation fear of European Christians? How does their sacrificial practice mirror our own? What lies at the heart of Man's thirst for conquest? Does the same brutal heart beat in the chest of the Conquistadors and the Mayan priests? How will the oppressive Mayan leaders respond to the yoke of their soon-to-be-realized colonial fate?

As with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, Apocalypto has pretensions of connecting our immediate circumstances to a larger theme. John Milius' original drafts of Apocalypse Now ended with a machismo-fueled battle between Kurtz and the Vietnamese army. Coppola, to his credit, decided to take a deeper journey into the nature of human on human violence.

Gibson appears to have taken the reverse track, taking a story with the intent of illuminating these themes and then copping out. Pity.

Two stars, Jason Paw sez, you don't really need to check it out.