Well, it's been a while since I posted. This is because the normal post-Christmas depresion has been a bit compounded by the fact that I'll be moving house shortly. I don't really want to move, but one of my housemates is an arse and the landlord won't do anything about it, so I've not much choice.
But no-one comes here to hear about that stuff, so here's a film review of Apocalypto.
Apocalypto actually holds together very well on the level of an action film. As you might have guessed with a Mel Gibson film, however, once you get beyond that level things get quite problematic.
I'm fully aware that Apocalypto is in one sense not to be taken literally, as Gibson is using Mesoamerican history to offer a critique of contemporary western society. However, if you're going to use a historical allegory, you should do your best to get the history right, or your allegory will be pretty poor. This is actually the main problem with Apocalypto: it uses various features from over 1000 years of Maya society and throws them together into a pseudo-culture. The pyramid-building Classical Maya society was gone for a good 600 years prior to the arrival of Europeans in the area.
The portrayal of the pseudo-Maya is also a problem. To believe the film, the Maya were a society of bloodthirsty psychopaths who had no redeeming features. Is that a valid way to treat the ancestors of a group of people who are still very much with us (there are still 6 million Maya living in Mexico and Central America)? The Classic Maya did practice limited human sacrifice, but then so did the Romans, who tend to get a much more positive portrayal in film than the Maya do here.
The negativity of the human sacrifice in Apocalypto is ironic, given the manner in which Gibson's personal interpretation of Christianity seems to be all about the torture and sacrifice. The film is certainly heavily influenced by Gibson's beliefs, with the attempts to Christianise the beliefs of the hero's people also being somewhat jaring.
All in all, Apocalypto is interesting, possibly worth seeing, but ultimately badly flawed.
No comments:
Post a Comment