Apocalypto

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
Apocalypto

Apocalypto promotional poster
Directed by Mel Gibson
Produced by Mel Gibson
Farhad Safinia
Bruce Davey
Written by Mel Gibson
Farhad Safinia
Starring Rudy Youngblood
Raoul Trujillo
Mayra Sérbulo
Dalia Hernández
Music by James Horner
Cinematography Dean Semler
Distributed by Touchstone Pictures (USA)
Icon Entertainment (non-USA)
Release date(s) December 8, 2006
Language Mayan
Budget $40 million
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile
Ratings
Australia:  MA15+
Canada (Brit.Col):  18A
Canada (Ontario):  18A
India:  A
Malaysia:  18PL
Singapore:  M18
United Kingdom:  18
United States:  R

Apocalypto is an Academy Award-nominated 2006 film directed by Mel Gibson. Set in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula before Spanish contact, it depicts one man's experience during the decline of the ancient Maya civilization. The film was released in the United States on December 8, 2006 to mostly positive reviews from film critics according to Rotten Tomatoes. It has been criticized by a number of anthropologists and archaeologists working in the field of Mayanist studies for its depiction of late Maya society as extremely violent, as well as for evident anachronisms and other historical inaccuracies.[1][2][3]

Contents

[edit] Production details

Mel Gibson filmed Apocalypto mainly in Catemaco, San Andres Tuxtla and Paso de Ovejas in the Mexican state of Veracruz. Gibson uses the Yukatec Maya language[4] in Apocalypto, in the same way he used Aramaic and Latin for his religious blockbuster The Passion of the Christ (2004). Apocalypto features a cast of unknown actors from Mexico City, the Yucatán, some Native Americans from the United States and Canada, and locals from Los Tuxtlas and Veracruz. The waterfall scene was filmed on a real waterfall called Salto de Eyipantla, which is located in San Andres Tuxtla.

While Gibson financed the film himself, Disney has signed on to release Apocalypto for a fee in certain markets. The film was slated for an August 4, 2006 release, but Touchstone Pictures delayed the release date to December 8, 2006 due to heavy rains interfering with filming in Mexico. On September 23, 2006, Gibson pre-screened Apocalypto to two predominantly Native American audiences in the US state of Oklahoma, at the Riverwind Casino in Goldsby, owned by the Chickasaw Nation, and at Cameron University in Lawton.[5] He also did a pre-screening in Austin, Texas on September 24 in conjunction with one of the movie's stars, Rudy Youngblood.[6]

[edit] Themes

The movie is partially intended as a political allegory about civilizations in decline.[7] Said Gibson in September of 2006: "The precursors to a civilization that’s going under are the same, time and time again... "[8] This is shown most literally though the opening quote by Will Durant and the last line by Jaguar Paw, "...seek a new beginning."

[edit] Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Jaguar Paw and his father Flint Sky in their village
Jaguar Paw and his father Flint Sky in their village

Opening quote: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." — W. Durant

During a tapir hunt in the Mesoamerican jungle, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), his father Flint Sky (Morris Birdyellowhead), and their fellow tribesmen encounter a procession of traumatized and fearful refugees. The procession's leader explains that their lands have been ravaged, and with Flint Sky's permission, the procession passes through the forest. When Jaguar Paw and his tribesmen return to their village, Flint Sky tells his son not to let the procession's fearful state seep into him. At night, the tribe's elder tells the village a fable of man dangerously never filling his want, despite having the capabilities of the world's animals. The villagers follow the story with music and dance, leaving Jaguar Paw to ponder.

The next morning, after Jaguar Paw wakes from a nightmare, he sees strangers enter the village, setting aflame homes with their torches. The raiders, led by Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo), attack the villagers and subdue as many as possible. Jaguar Paw slips out of the village with his pregnant wife Seven (Dalia Hernández) and his little son Turtles Run, lowering them on a vine into a small cave (a chultun, shaped something like a well)[9] to hide them. Jaguar Paw returns to his village to fight against the raiders, but he is subdued with the rest of his tribesmen. A raider whom Jaguar Paw attacked, the vicious Middle Eye (Gerardo Taracena), prepares to execute Flint Sky in front of his son. Flint Sky tells Jaguar Paw not to be afraid, and Middle Eye slits Flint Sky's throat.

Maya city rulers look up to the approaching solar eclipse
Maya city rulers look up to the approaching solar eclipse

Before the raiders leave the village with their prisoners, one suspicious raider severs the vine leading into the ground cave, trapping Jaguar Paw's wife and son within. The raiders and their captives trek toward a Maya city, encountering failed maize crops and slaves producing plaster. They also pass a small girl with leprosy (alternatively congenital syphilis) who warns the raiders that their end is near. In the city's outskirts, the female villagers are sold as slaves, and the male villagers are escorted into the city to the top of a step pyramid. The high priest sacrifices several captives by pulling out their hearts and then decapitating them. When Jaguar Paw is on the altar to be sacrificed, a solar eclipse stays the priest's hand. The priest declares the sun god Kukulkan satisfied with the sacrifices, and he asks the sun god to restore light. The eclipse passes, and light returns to the world.

Zero Wolf, told to dispose of the captives by the priest, takes them to a ball field. Their captives are released in pairs to run the length of the field while the raiders target them with javelins, arrows, and stones. Jaguar Paw successfully reaches the field's end and though injured by an arrow, bypasses a raider "finisher", Zero Wolf's son, Cut Rock, by killing him. An enraged Zero Wolf pursues Jaguar Paw into the jungle with his fellow raiders. The chase leads back to the forest in which Jaguar Paw's village was located. As he flees, Jaguar Paw jumps over a high waterfall and survives. He declares from the riverbank below that the raiders are now in his territory.

Zero Wolf's raiders fall to both the forest's elements and Jaguar Paw's traps. A heavy rain sets in, which begins to flood the ground cave in which Jaguar Paw's wife and son are still trapped. Jaguar Paw bludgeons Middle Eye in hand-to-hand combat and kills Zero Wolf by setting off a trap meant for hunting tapir. He is chased by two remaining raiders out to a beach where they encounter conquistadors and missionaries making their way toward the shore in rowboats (the Spanish conquest of Yucatan actually started in 1519). The amazement of the raiders allows Jaguar Paw to flee. He returns into the forest to rescue his wife and son from the cave. He finds that his wife has given a submerged birth to a healthy second son, and the family is rescued. Jaguar Paw leads them deeper into the forest, leaving behind the conquistadors anchored in ships off the beach.

[edit] Critical reception

Apocalypto was given "two big thumbs up" by Richard Roeper and guest critic Aisha Tyler on Ebert & Roeper at the movies.[10] Michael Medved gave Apocalypto four stars (out of four) calling the film "an adrenaline-drenched chase movie" and "a visceral visual experience."[11] Overall the review tallying website Rotten Tomatoes reported that 107 out of the 164 reviews they tallied were positive for a score of 65% and a certification of "fresh".[12]

Contrary to the omens that the film would not have a warm reception in Mexico, it registered a wider number of viewers than Perfume and Rocky Balboa. It even displaced memorable Mexican premiers such as Titanic and Poseidon.[13] And according to polls performed by the newspaper Reforma, 80% of polled Mexicans labeled the film as “very good” or “good”[14]

Spoilers end here.

[edit] Inaccuracies

The film has been accused of historical inaccuracy and racism by historians, Native Americans, and those in the archaeological community.[2] The film has been accused of fueling a stereotype of native Mesoamericans as bloodthirsty savages with few civilized achievements other than architecture.[2] For example, it was more typical of the Aztecs to practice the kind of human sacrifice depicted in the movie, rather than the Maya. The sun god Kukulkan, to whom the sacrifices are offered, is in fact the Maya equivalent of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl and did not demand human sacrifice.

On the other hand, in Maya rituals prisoners of war were in fact killed "on top of the pyramid […] by having his arms and legs held while a priest cut open his chest with a sacrificial flint knife and tore out his heart as an offering." [15] In an article in the newspaper Reforma, Juan E. Pardinas wrote:

“ The bad news is that this historical interpretation bears some resemblances with reality […]. Mel Gibson’s characters are more similar to the Mayas of the Bonampak’s murals than the ones that appear in the Mexican school textbooks. [16] ”

[edit] Mesoamerican history

On a very basic level, the movie contains a number of items unknown in precolumbian Mesoamerica. The Maya city inaccurately combines details from different Maya and Mesoamerican cultures widely separated by time and place.[3] For example, temples are in the shape of those of Tikal in the central lowlands classic style while decorated with Puuc style elements of the north west Yucatan centuries later. The mural in the arched walkway includes elements from the Maya codices combined with elements from the Bonampak murals (over 700 years older than the film's setting) and the San Bartolo murals (some 1500 years older than the film's setting) — as in most civilizations, the styles of Maya art changed dramatically over the centuries. Elements of such non-Maya civilizations as those of Teotihuacan and the Aztec are also seen. Robert Carmack, an anthropology professor from SUNY Albany's renowned Mesoamerican program said "It's a big mistake — almost a tragedy — that they present this as a Maya film."[3] His colleague, Walter Little, agreed: "A lot of people will think this is how it was, unfortunately."[3]

Stephen Houston, Professor of Anthropology at Brown University, points out that human sacrifice victims among the Maya were captured kings, members of royal families, and other high-ranking nobility. "They didn't run around rounding up ordinary people to sacrifice." (See Washington Post, 15 December 2006.) However MSN Encarta[15] mentions decapitation of royalty and heart extraction of slaves and prisoners. Karl Taube, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Riverside, objects to the huge pit filled with corpses. "We have no evidence of mass graves," he points out. Professor Taube also objects to the large number of slaves, something for which there is also no evidence (Washington Post, ibid.) Also, there is little possibility that the Maya would have been "dumbstruck" by the sight of a city.[3] As agricultural people, they also would not have allowed fields of rotting corpses near their crops.[3] Zachary Hruby, of UC Riverside, lamented the use of the Yucatec Maya language, as it gives a sense of authenticity to a film that he says has taken many unfortunate liberties with the subject. Specifically these liberties include: the style and scale of the sacrifices, the presentation of the Maya villagers as isolated people living off the wild forest, the chronological compression of the more urbanized Terminal Classic Maya and the primarily village-dwelling Late Postclassic Maya.[17] Gibson also includes the arrival of clearly Christian missionaries in the last five minutes of the story even though the truth is that the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last large Maya city was abandoned. However, in spite of the fact that the Maya had largely abandoned their intensive agricultural system at the time of the Spanish arrival, there were still comparatively smaller Maya cities: Mayapan, Tiho, Coba, Chetumal and Nito.

Some Mayanists disagree with the romantic view about the Mayas. "The first researchers tried to make a distinction between the 'peaceful' Maya and the 'brutal' cultures of central Mexico," David Stuart wrote in a 2003 article. "They even tried to say human sacrifice was rare among the Maya." But in carvings and mural paintings, Stuart said —:

“ we have now found more and greater similarities between the Aztecs and Mayas, ”

—including a Maya ceremony in which a grotesquely costumed priest is shown pulling the entrails from a bound and apparently living sacrificial victim[18] and even child sacrifices. [19]

Interviewed by the British Sunday Times, Gibson defended his film before the attacks of the critics:

“ I didn't show half the stuff I read about. I read about an orgy of sacrifice: 20,000 people sacrificed in four days. They were also very fond of impaling genitals and torturing people for years on end. For instance, if they captured a king or queen from another place, they would humiliate them for a decade. They would cut off their lips, have their tongues ripped out, they would have no eyes and no ears. Oh, and they would chew their fingers off. The guy would be alive but was just a babbling mass of nerve endings, then they'd roll him up in a ball after nine years of this stuff and roll him down the temple stairs and pulverise him.[20][21] ”

[edit] The eclipse

The solar eclipse is portrayed as occurring in few seconds, with the moon moving rapidly to obstruct the sun, then remaining motionless for some time, before moving away quickly. In reality, while totality may be brief, eclipses take place over several hours, with the moon moving at a constant pace throughout. In the film, the eclipse is followed by a full moon on what appears to be the evening of the same day, an astronomical impossibility: solar eclipses only occur during the new moon. Edgar Martin del Campo of SUNY Albany has pointed out that the Maya had an understanding of astronomy and would not have been in awe of an eclipse as they are depicted in the movie.[3] However, while Maya astronomers and priests knew about eclipses and how to predict their occurrences, lay people may not have had access to the same information. In the movie, the reactions of the priests may suggest that they were fully expecting the eclipse and had scheduled the ritual sacrificial ceremony to co-incide with it.

The eclipse scene of the film is reminiscent of an episode during Christopher Columbus' fourth voyage; Columbus impressed local Arawaks in what is now Jamaica by predicting a lunar eclipse. Literary derivatives of this event, usually employing the more dramatic solar eclipse, have become something of a cliche, appearing in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and in an episode of The Adventures of Tintin called Prisoners of the Sun, adapted to the screen as Tintin and the Temple of the Sun. This same plot device was recognized as an inaccurate cliche as early as 1952 by Guatemalan author Augusto Monterroso, who used an ironic reversal of this plot in his story The Eclipse, [1] in which a friar who tries to use this gambit is sacrificed as the priest calmly reads "one by one, the unending dates in which there would be solar and lunar eclipses, which the Maya astronomers had predicted and noted in their codices without the invaluable help of Aristotle."

[edit] Awards

The film was nominated in three categories at the 79th Academy Awards: Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Makeup. However, it lost all of these. It also earned Golden Globe, BAFTA and BFCA nominations for Best Foreign-Language Film.

[edit] Box office

Budgeted at $40 million, Apocalypto enjoyed a $15 million opening weekend, topping the Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle Blood Diamond and Nancy Meyers' The Holiday. The following weekend, it dropped 46.6% to land in sixth place. It dipped another 50% over the four-day Christmas frame and fell out of the top 10 altogether. As of March 21, 2007, the film has grossed $114,172,584 worldwide.

In the United Kingdom the film set a new record for the highest opening weekend take by a foreign language film. It took £1.3m compared to the previous record holder, Hero, which took £1.05m in 2004. Gibson's The Passion of the Christ only took £229,426. [22]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "Is "Apocalypto" Pornography?", Archaeology Magazine, 5 December 2006
  2. ^ a b c "Gibson film angers Mayan groups", BBC, 8 December 2006
  3. ^ a b c d e f g McGuire, Mark. "'Apocalypto' a pack of inaccuracies", San Diego Union Tribune, 12 December 2006. Retrieved on 2006-12-12.
  4. ^ Actors spoke Yucatec Maya language, BProphets-Apoc
  5. ^ "Gibson takes 'Apocalypto' to Oklahoma", Associated Press, 2006-09-23. Retrieved on 2006-09-24. (in English)
  6. ^ "Mel campaigns for new movie, against war in Iraq", Reuters, 2006-09-24. Retrieved on 2006-09-25. (in English)
  7. ^ E. Michael Jones,"Abortion and Human Sacrifice in the Americas".
  8. ^ "Mel Gibson criticizes Iraq war at film fest - Troubled filmmaker draws parallels to collapsing Mayan civilization", Associated Press, September 25, 2006. Retrieved on 2006-12-12.
  9. ^ Chultuns are underground cavities with a typically narrow opening, which the Maya either excavated in toto or enlarged from a natural depression, which were used chiefly for water storage, but also for the storage of other goods and even burials.
  10. ^ Ebert & Roeper at the Movies air date 2006-12-10
  11. ^ http://images.michaelmedved.com/images/pdf/apocalypto.doc
  12. ^ http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/apocalypto/
  13. ^ Staff, Reforma (30 January 2007). Reforma, “Califican con 7.6 a Apocalypto”. 
  14. ^ Ibid.
  15. ^ a b "Maya Civilization", MSN Encarta
  16. ^ “La mala noticia es que esta interpretación histórica tiene alguna dosis de realidad […]. Los personajes de Mel Gibson se parecen más a los mayas de los murales de Bonampak que a los que aparecen en los libros de la SEP.” —Reforma, “Nacionalismo de piel delgada”, 4 February 2007
  17. ^ Hruby, Zachary. "Apocalypto: A New Begining or a Step Backwards", Mesoweb News & Reports, 08 December 2006. Retrieved on 2006-12-12.
  18. ^ http://www.livescience.com/history/human_sacrifice_050123.html
  19. ^ Stuart, David (2003). "La ideología del sacrificio entre los mayas". Arqueología mexicana XI, 63: 24-29. 
  20. ^ Mel Gibson on his movie 'Apocalypto', interview Sunday Times, January 2007
  21. ^ http://www.allgreatquotes.com/mel_gibson_quotes.shtml
  22. ^ "Mel Gibson's Apocalypto smashes record", Guardian, January 9, 2007

[edit] External links

[edit] Reviews


Films directed by Mel Gibson
The Man Without a Face • Braveheart • The Passion of the Christ • Apocalypto
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../a/p/o/Apocalypto.html"