APOCALYPTO [2006] review

It seems Mel Gibson likes to (literally) paint his heroes blue. Jaguar Paw in APOCALYPTO is covered in blue dye at one point in the movie, but just like in BRAVEHEART, applying the blue seems to embolden the individual. The lush Mexican jungles Gibson filmed in look good, but unlike Malick’s NEW WORLD, don’t seem as alive or sacred as one would expect, despite characters’ show great reverence to it.

Perhaps this was due to my relative lack of emotional connection to the characters. Sure, we are introduced to a likable bunch of Mayans, and bad things soon happen to them, but it’s more human-on-human violence for no apparent reason, and maybe I am just growing numb of it (same thing happened in BLOOD DIAMOND). Humans are ultra-violent, always have been, and still are, and one of the greatest farces of modern civilization is forgetting how violent humans actually are by nature. Humans are very far from being civilized.

As a straight action movie, and as a pure bad-ass, APOCALYPTO and Jaguar Paw, respectively, deliver. The actor playing Jaguar Paw was slightly distracting to me as I thought he looked a lot like Ronaldinho the soccer player, but other than that, my eyes were fixed on his wide open eyes as they scanned the jungle, sometimes slowly in observation, other times in mad glances looking for slips in the flora.

There is not much story to APOCALYPTO, and I found the ending rather unsatisfying. The bad guys were not nearly developed enough. I would have liked to know why they did what they did, if they were ok with it, if they did it just because they were soldiers, or what. There were a good share of predictable moments and other unrpedictable ones. You know if someone goes up high to hide and is bleeding, no doubt a single drop of blood will give that person away. Gibson plays this cliche slightly differently, but still. A richly shown world, but all we saw of it was the action and rot. For me, it wasn’t enough to be captivated, but enough to at least be entertained.

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