Apocalypto

Apocalypto (2006)

Directed by: Mel Gibson
Written by: Mel Gibson and Farhad Safinia
Starring: Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernández, Raoul Trujillo, Gerardo Taracena, Jonathan Brewer, Rodolfo Palacios, Morris Birdyellowhead, Ariel Galvan, Carlos Emilio Báez, Iazua Larios

The latest picture from Mel Gibson (apparently...). I wasn't crazy about The Passion for various reasons (this is not up for debate - it's personal). However, this movie sort of peaked my interest.

It's about a guy who has to escape from these scary human sacrifice people, run around in the jungle, and save his family while enduring lots of pain and blood loss and general unpleasantness.

I'm actually not sure yet whether I liked it or not (I liked parts of it...). First of all, it's marginally less violent than The Passion (that's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It's a neutral observation). It's still violent as hell and a little bit disturbing.

There's some scary shit in there, but I guess that sort of goes with the subject matter. I'm not entirely sure how accurate the movie is, historically speaking, but I'm going to assume they did more research than I have.

The movie looked fantastic. Mel Gibson (apart from being one of my favourite action movie heroes ever - yeah Road Warrior) is a pretty good director. I also liked the people who were in it for whatever reason. They had cool stuff... you know?

So it's a pretty good movie. Well made (though it kind of looked like it was shot on digital... that bothered me. I am a digital snob), literally action packed (it never stops) and kind of cool.

On the other hand: it had scenes that seemed to be lifted right out of every other movie with Mel Gibson in it (Road Warrior, Braveheart, Signs...) among other things. The Mummy. They should make a Mummy with a South American mummy. Right now.

It was also not particularly engaging emotionally. I mean, I wasn't into the whole 'rescuing the family thing'. I guess there had to be something else going on, some other reason for that guy to go to all that trouble. And man, he went through a lot of shit. I was expecting him to just sort of drop dead after a while. That would have been a really lame movie, though.

And I wasn't convinced that it needed to have subtitles. Knowing what the people were saying didn't really add all that much to the movie, for me - they could have done it like Quest for Fire or something. Yeah, they would've had to change about half the movie (I'm really not sure that the grammar in that sentence works, but I'm just going to leave it that way), but dammit... dunno where I'm going. Whatever.

Um, yeah, kind of interesting movie and pretty entertaining if you overlook all the little bits of Mel Gibson weirdness (I used to love him so much before I knew he was weird - actually, I still do. I don't care, he's really cool. I can't resist his magic spell. The Mel-spell. It's kind of scary. I mean, I'd convert to his weird uber-Catholic thing or whatever if he told me to. It's that smile, gets me every time. He's be a great missionary).

Okay, I'm rambling now. Still undecided about the movie. I dunno. It was pretty good.

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