'A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within' - Title card
It's hard to read that quote without automatically applying it to Mel Gibson's career. Apocalypto was supposed to be his lap of honour as a director. Braveheart had proved that he could make Oscar-winning films, and The Passion of the Christ proved that he no longer needed Hollywood – his self-financed, subtitled, shockingly violent religious film was turned down by all the studios and yet somehow still ended up making over half a billion dollars. Apocalypto should have been the gold-plated consolidation of all Mel Gibson's talents. He'd discovered a new way of making and distributing films, and he no longer had to answer to anybody. Except himself.
Eight years later and Gibson's been reduced to making brief, stunt-cast cameos in god-awful action films that nobody will remember. His downfall – starting with the ugly drink-driving arrest six months before Apocalypto's release – has been so messy and public that his stock has all but completely vanished. There's a very real chance that Apocalypto will be the last thing that Mel Gibson ever directs, so the least we can do is strip away all the horrible context and see if the last eight years have been kind to it.
'He will go on taking and taking, until one day the world will say, "I am no more and I have nothing left to give"' - Story Teller
Being a film about the dying throes of a historical era, full of gratuitous gore and performed in a dead language, it'd be easy to simply write off Apocalypto as The Passion of the Christ in the Jungle. However, it's less a remake than a refinement. Gibson kept what worked from Passion – the subtitles, the brutality, the feverish visuals – and disposed of all the distasteful religious hectoring. What we're left with, in essence, is a muscular action film that just happens to wear a light coat of accessible prestige. The last half of it is basically Predator, for crying out loud.
But this is a late-period Mel Gibson film, so there's still a mound of hubris for us all to wade through. Even though it's about the Mayans, Apocalypto is still very much Gibson's State of the World Today film. Like the Mayans, he says, we, too, are blindly wandering towards destruction. We, too, think we've figured it all out. But before long – because Mel Gibson does actually seem to think that he's figured it all out, and really wants to tell us about it – we'll be done for. The first scene involves the consumption of animal testicles. If that's not an explicit sign that I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here is a harbinger of certain doom, I don't know what is.
'Hey, I am walking here!' – Zero Wolf
That said, the main reason why Apocalypto is so entertaining is because it's just relentlessly stupid. It's like Home Alone as directed by Sam Raimi. Right at the start of the film, Jaguar Paw – the protagonist – is given the nickname Almost. We can assume that this is purely because he's almost Mr Bean. The entire plot of the film is basically one long game of Good News/Bad News. Good news: Jaguar Paw has a happy life. Bad news: he gets captured. Good news: he narrowly avoids being murdered. Bad news: that's only so that he can be sacrificed on top of a pyramid.
But good news! He's spared because of a freak solar eclipse. Bad news: he can only escape by running a gauntlet while people fire arrows at him. Good news: he survives. Bad news: the baddies chase him. Good news: he hides up a tree. Bad news: there's a jaguar in it. Good news: the jaguar eats someone else. Good news: He escapes again. Bad news: he's forced to jump off a waterfall. Good news: he survives the fall. Bad news: he immediately falls into some quicksand. On and on and on it goes, until the baddest news of them all arrives – a boatload of Spaniards, armed to the gills with civilisation-destroying syphilis, arrive. Jaguar Paw is simultaneously the luckiest and unluckiest character in cinema history. In retrospect, Apocalypto might be the nearest that Mel Gibson will ever get to directing a Three Stooges film.
Notes
Obviously from a historical perspective, Apocalypto is utter tosh, as Alex von Tunzelmann explained in her Reel History instalment from 2008.
According to this YouTube video, Mel Gibson stuck a single frame of himself smoking a cigarette into the Apocalypto trailer. Oh Mel, such a prankster.
It's taken eight years for me to work this out, but I've finally remembered who Jaguar Paw reminds me of – it's Joe Swash, who used to be on EastEnders. And now it's all I can see when I look at him.
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