Apocalypto

I didn't sleep well last night. I seem to be developing problems with my back, which seems singularly unfair since I've lost 70 pounds. Maybe my disks and whatnot are decompressing and changing shape; maybe I'm just a whiner.

The point is that I couldn't sleep, and I ended up sitting up and watching Mel Gibson's movie Apocalypto, which is about, generally speaking, the waning days of the Maya civilization in what I presume to be the Yucatan region of Mexico. I went into this movie with certain misgivings, most of them revolving around the figure of Mel Gibson himself and his anti-Semitic rants. More of those I don't need, and support of those who make them I don't give. But it's hard to see the hand of Mel Gibson behind the movie. Impossible, maybe, since it strikes such an alien tone.

Alien. That's a good word for it. The bulk of the story revolves around the lives and times of a Maya hunter-gatherer village in the jungle. The dialog is entirely in Mayan, and the actors all appear to be Mayan. I'm no expert on the Maya by any means, but the combination of Mayan language, unmistakable Mayan facial features, and fairly realistic Neolithic living conditions produced a feeling of strong authenticity in me. I entirely bought the premise that these people were Maya in the 16th Century living the way Maya actually did.

Presently the village is overrun by slave-hunters, who are realistically brutal. They drag the surviving men and women off to an unnamed Maya city (actually, the movie doesn't even claim that it's a Maya city; it's just a "stone-built place"). The women are sold into slavery and the men are dragged up to the top of a pyramid and sacrificed. It's a literal assembly line of death - human raw material going up the ramp at the back; blood and severed heads going down the steps in front. I don't know if Gibson was accurately depicting what historians believe the mood in Maya cities to have been or if he was just winging it, but his interpretation seemed incredibly real and frightening to me. It's as though they know their civilization is failing and they sacrifice more and more people and slowly work themselves into a state of desperate terrified blood-glutted brutality.

The story turns more personal again once the hero escapes from the madhouse of the Mayan city. He's pursued by about eight Mayans, and in the end he prevails, but it isn't easy. But his victory is hollow, because a new threat appears on the coast, an enemy that in the end he will not prevail over.

The mood of the movie is dark and rather depressing. It's very bloody and violent, but what makes it depressing isn't the pumping blood and screaming but the sense of impending doom that follows everyone like their own personal storm system. And you don't need to have much of a grasp of Meso-American history to know that in the long run the hero is totally screwed.

It isn't a date movie. It isn't a family movie. It isn't even a fun movie. But it is a singular viewing experience, an immersion in a convincing Maya world with all that that implies. It may be a while before I watch it again, but I'm glad I watched it. It reminds me a little of Schindler's List in that it's also a masterpiece of film-making, but it's also very hard to watch.

On the one hand it's an amazing technical achievement - the level of detail in the scenes in the Mayan city, for example, commands respect. And yet it's also a brilliant achievement by the actors. Though they're speaking Mayan, they act and emote in a very real and human way, all of them. Jaguar Paw and Flint Sky were particularly good, but the real stolen scene in the movie occurs when a seven-year-old Mayan girl curses the slave-hunters. Now that was creepy, but what's perhaps even more creepy is the fact that the seven-year-old girl came from a nearby village and had never acted before... She's going to appear in my nightmares, I'm sure.

Anyway. An excellent movie, but not one I'll watch often, and not a movie for the squeamish.