'Apocalypto'

Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" passes the only movie test that's important. It's the "I'd pay to see that" test.

As in, "a blood-spattered jungle chase epic set at the end of the Mayan Empire? I'd pay to see that."

It's a movie that spares no effort to take us to a place and time we haven't been before. Mel's latest history lesson is a parable about ignorance, environmental degradation, senseless sacrifice and religious fanaticism. He's made a big film about the collapse of Mayan civilization, but he's talking about our own.

There's the rub. Knowing as much as we know about Gibson's beliefs, the movie feels like strained Catholic prophecy. The way he depicts the Mayans - so savage, superstitious and doomed - he suggests that maybe Catholic Spain did them a favor when they rowed ashore to enslave and wipe out - ahem - convert them. Gibson has cited Spanish missionary accounts of the Maya as research for the film. But those same missionaries burned virtually all Mayan books as heretical, so that history would never have a chance to judge them on their own merits.

"Apocalypto" begins with a lengthy peek at the jungle world of a tribe of hunter-gatherers. They trap pig-like tapirs, kill them, divide the spoils, and crack bawdy jokes about each others' manhood. They are primitive, but they have a sense of humor about themselves. They tell mother-in-law jokes. Grudges aren't borne for long, even ones that begin when one guy is tricked into eating tapir testicles.

A chance encounter with other primitives is a warning. They're fleeing because their lands were "ravaged." Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood, just great) wants to know by whom, where, and when. But his "wise" father, Flint Sky (Morris Birdyellowhead) counsels keeping what they've seen to themselves. He's never met an ostrich, but he knows all about sticking one's head in the sand.

A dawn raid by better-armed and organized warriors, bedecked in copper, gold, jade and human jawbones, wakes them all up, too late. The Maya slaughter some, enslave others. Jaguar Paw hides his wife in a cave with no way out (smart), and then he's captured. A brutal trek through the jungles takes people whose lives have been limited by their immediate surroundings into a world of cultivated (and failing) crops, organized (slave) labor, a vast city of stone dominated by steep, bloodstained pyramids.

But the Maya, we see, are in decline. Plague, deforestation, war, pestilence and over-population have made them frantic to sacrifice more and more captives to the gods they are sure they have lost favor with.

Gibson recreates a chaotic Mayan world, filling the screen with more images of merchants, laborers, the leisure class and bloodstained priesthood than the eye can easily absorb. The Maya's days of science and art and organization are behind them. Now, fanaticism and superstition rule. Gibson doesn't romanticize them, or the hunter-gatherers. The emphasis here is on the brutal, the brutish and the savage.

For all its texture (the actors speak Yucatec Maya, with subtitles) and "message," "Apocalypto" is a stunningly simple picture. It's a compendium of every forest chase tale you've ever seen, from the Tarzan movies to the Indiana Jones pictures, "The Naked Prey" to "The Last of the Mohicans." Gibson cuts, in classic cliffhanger style, between Jaguar Paw's quest and his wife and child's struggle to stay alive long enough to be rescued.

Drama, Two hours, 10 min. RATING: R (for sequences of graphic violence and disturbing images.) In Yucatec Maya, with subtitles. STARS Rudy Youngblood, Raoul Trujillo, Dalia Hernandez PLOT: A look at the world of the Mayans KIDS: Pretty intense for young ones. Pretty intense for any age. DIRECTOR: Mel Gibson

Apocalypto