Apocalypto
Dec. 17th, 2006 10:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI just got back from Apocalypto and am still flying high on non-drowsy decongestants and conversation, so here's a prompt 'review'! This isn't going to be terribly organized but I'll give it a shot anyway.
The movie opens with a quote that goes something like 'Civilisations are never conquered from without until they destroy themselves from within.' Excellent, I think, it's a movie version of A Short History of Progress! This wasn't what I was expecting! Cool! But ... how are they going to show the collapse of a civilisation in one movie? And still have character and plot and stuff?
Well... they didn't exactly. It was more implied. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The movie is told from the point of view of a man from a village out in the jungle somewhere, evidently not part of the large civilisation which eventually takes him captive. [DIVERSION: I had somehow come under the impression that the Maya had fallen back in 900 AD or so and the Aztecs had more or less replaced them but I did a little fact-checking and it looks like the Aztecs were further north than the Maya and that the Maya were co-existing in a somewhat lessened state. I'm not enough of an expert in Mesoamerican civilisations to tell them apart by sight so I'm going to say the principal civilisation in this movie was the Maya because that's what the promotional material seemed to suggest.] He gets taken to a great big city to be offered as a sacrifice to avert the impending doom the civilisation finds itself facing but by an amazing twist of fate avoids that and ends up being hunted through the jungle by his captors.
I was a little tentative going into this movie because I had seen The Passion of the Christ and was heartily unimpressed by the fimmaking techniques therein, most notably the overuse of slow motion and the wallowing in gore. But the trailer looked good, and I was interested in seeing the Mayan civilisation on film (in a portrayal that wasn't El Dorado), and it sounded like a good time when we planned it on Friday night, so ... there I was. In the second row, no less. This made the very motion-blurry hunting scenes at the beginning a little too eye-boggling, and the subsequent use of shaky cameras not much better ... this seems to be a current fashion in filmmaking and while it works all right when judiciously applied in moderation, most of the time it's TOO MUCH. I'm hoping it goes out of style soon, like 'bullet-time' did. Movies will be much more visually comprehensible when it does. I was mightily relieved, though, to see that Mr Gibson has overcome his slow-mo addiction and only used it when more or less necessary. On top of this, in a movie that is set mostly in a civilisation more notorious for its gratuitous blood and gore than any other in collective memory, Mr Passion somehow managed not to spray blood all over the screen – there is a certain amount of it, yes, but it was surprisingly subdued considering hearts were being ripped out and heads cut off and bodies thrown down pyramids...
I have just looked at my clock and realised I need to wrap this up if I want any hope of doing anything at all tomorrow.
All in all: surprisingly engaging. And quite a lavish production. Cool to hear the Mayan language spoken outside of a PBS documentary. I'm not sure jaguars growl like lions, though; don't they sound more like cougars? And it looked a bit like an R.O.U.S. at times. I'm stuck on the jaguar. I was startled by the ending because I was expecting the movie to be about the fall of the Classical Maya (A.D. 900) but I won't give any more away than you've probably guessed already... It was also very cool how this actual, real, historical civilisation was portrayed in a way that made it seem more alien than most alien civilisations I've encountered in sci-fi. Not that there have been all that many. But most are, in some respect, an intentional reflection or refraction of our own or of one familiar to us, whereas this ... this was pretty darn alien.
In the credits the movie was dedicated to Abel – way to tie René Girard and Ronald Wright together in one superlative package! If only the actual film had had some more potent Scapegoat Mechanism or Short History of Progress in it... It would have been hard to do that from the outsider point of view it took, though. It got close, sometimes, and almost sounded like a cautionary tale, but ... oh well.
The movie opens with a quote that goes something like 'Civilisations are never conquered from without until they destroy themselves from within.' Excellent, I think, it's a movie version of A Short History of Progress! This wasn't what I was expecting! Cool! But ... how are they going to show the collapse of a civilisation in one movie? And still have character and plot and stuff?
Well... they didn't exactly. It was more implied. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
The movie is told from the point of view of a man from a village out in the jungle somewhere, evidently not part of the large civilisation which eventually takes him captive. [DIVERSION: I had somehow come under the impression that the Maya had fallen back in 900 AD or so and the Aztecs had more or less replaced them but I did a little fact-checking and it looks like the Aztecs were further north than the Maya and that the Maya were co-existing in a somewhat lessened state. I'm not enough of an expert in Mesoamerican civilisations to tell them apart by sight so I'm going to say the principal civilisation in this movie was the Maya because that's what the promotional material seemed to suggest.] He gets taken to a great big city to be offered as a sacrifice to avert the impending doom the civilisation finds itself facing but by an amazing twist of fate avoids that and ends up being hunted through the jungle by his captors.
I was a little tentative going into this movie because I had seen The Passion of the Christ and was heartily unimpressed by the fimmaking techniques therein, most notably the overuse of slow motion and the wallowing in gore. But the trailer looked good, and I was interested in seeing the Mayan civilisation on film (in a portrayal that wasn't El Dorado), and it sounded like a good time when we planned it on Friday night, so ... there I was. In the second row, no less. This made the very motion-blurry hunting scenes at the beginning a little too eye-boggling, and the subsequent use of shaky cameras not much better ... this seems to be a current fashion in filmmaking and while it works all right when judiciously applied in moderation, most of the time it's TOO MUCH. I'm hoping it goes out of style soon, like 'bullet-time' did. Movies will be much more visually comprehensible when it does. I was mightily relieved, though, to see that Mr Gibson has overcome his slow-mo addiction and only used it when more or less necessary. On top of this, in a movie that is set mostly in a civilisation more notorious for its gratuitous blood and gore than any other in collective memory, Mr Passion somehow managed not to spray blood all over the screen – there is a certain amount of it, yes, but it was surprisingly subdued considering hearts were being ripped out and heads cut off and bodies thrown down pyramids...
I have just looked at my clock and realised I need to wrap this up if I want any hope of doing anything at all tomorrow.
All in all: surprisingly engaging. And quite a lavish production. Cool to hear the Mayan language spoken outside of a PBS documentary. I'm not sure jaguars growl like lions, though; don't they sound more like cougars? And it looked a bit like an R.O.U.S. at times. I'm stuck on the jaguar. I was startled by the ending because I was expecting the movie to be about the fall of the Classical Maya (A.D. 900) but I won't give any more away than you've probably guessed already... It was also very cool how this actual, real, historical civilisation was portrayed in a way that made it seem more alien than most alien civilisations I've encountered in sci-fi. Not that there have been all that many. But most are, in some respect, an intentional reflection or refraction of our own or of one familiar to us, whereas this ... this was pretty darn alien.
In the credits the movie was dedicated to Abel – way to tie René Girard and Ronald Wright together in one superlative package! If only the actual film had had some more potent Scapegoat Mechanism or Short History of Progress in it... It would have been hard to do that from the outsider point of view it took, though. It got close, sometimes, and almost sounded like a cautionary tale, but ... oh well.
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no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 11:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 04:13 pm (UTC)Holy cow, mind-blowing. Though I thought the ending was a bit of a Utopian cop-out. SO AMAZING THOUGH. Why is this not one of his more famous books? I haven't met anyone else who has read it, besides my dad, who I 'borrowed' it from.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 04:27 pm (UTC)I read it, too. I like OSC books a lot. I did not like this one as much as I liked his other books, but the idea behind it was very good.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 05:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 07:29 pm (UTC)A surprisingly small portion of the movie is actually set amongst the Maya... just so you know. It's mostly jungle.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-04 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 06:44 pm (UTC)I'm a bit rusty on my history, but I'm almost sure the movie has shredded the facts to make the movie more gory and catching.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-18 09:35 pm (UTC)Either way, I don't want to see the film.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-24 04:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-24 12:34 pm (UTC)(I read a Horrible History about the Incas.)
no subject
Date: 2006-12-19 12:53 am (UTC)While I'm not going to judge before I see it, it sounds like The Road to El Dorado is closer to the truth than this.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-19 01:49 am (UTC)