Just watched it today. I thought it was pretty good. Definitely worth a viewing.
what’s the joke?
Not in “Peace Movies?”
I would pay $20 to see a remake of “The Passion of the Christ” called “The Pizzle of the Chrizzle.”
“My God, my God. Why you forsake me, bitch?”
If you squint your eyes just so, the spaces between the letters say
J E S U S L O V E S Y O U
Well said, my thoughts exactly.
I think that the point was to be entertaining. That’s what I look for in a movie. I liked it. I was entertained. YMMV (if you actually watch it).
Thing is…Gibson probably believes that it actually has some sort of message or profundity. I just couldn’t discern what it was.
I don’t think that he believes it was “profound”, but I thought his point was pretty clear.
First of all, as a couple of others mentioned. . .it was great as a Mayan “First Blood.” The whole last hour was basically a pursuit through a jungle with Jaguar Paw hiding out and setting traps, and his wife and kid might as well have had a bomb strapped to them with a red L.E.D. countdown.
But, I thought the movie was gorgeous. . .the dust covered men. We don’t really see much primary color until we get to the “civilization”. . .the blue paint, the green women. The lush jungle, the black cat, Jaguar Paw covered with quicksand. Gibson seems pretty professional behind the camera; he’s excellent at creating tension and drama and a sense of foreboding.
But, as to Mel’s point: I thought he got it across without totally spelling it out, but without it being buried subtext either. Some reviewers seemed to read it as an urban/rural conflict, but I think that’s missing the point. It was more that we’re entertaining and consuming ourselves to death, lacking any sort of respect for a simpler lifestyle. They’re destroying their environment, their health – they’ve no respect for cultures “below” them.
I thought he got the point across nicely without being heavy handed about it, in the framework of a heck of a romp.
I really liked this movie.
Wow, I didn’t get that message (or any other message for that matter) from the movie.
Like someone said earlier : it was kind of like First Blood in Mayan times (without the depth of First Blood 
)
I hadn’t really thought about it that way, but I believe you’re onto something there.
It can be viewed as a movie with Christian environmentalist themes, among other things.
So when the Spanish ship with a huge cross on its sail shows up at the end, that’s an allusion to Christ’s return which, in Mel’s worldview, will herald a new order. Hence the movie’s name. And in Mel’s view we’d better straighten up and treat God’s earth and its people better in the meantime.
Saw it last night.
I pretty much agree with what you said. Let me also add another layer. I thought Gibson made a very relevant commentary showing how a more powerful/organized/complex society can pretty blithley destroy a less powerful/organized/complex society; and how they can do it feeling justified because thier religion says its ok and their more “advancedness” makes it an improvement. In Apocolypto the Mayans are doing it to Jaguar Paw’s tribe. Then the Spanish are going to in turn do it to the Maya. (My one beef with the movie: The Mayans had pretty much run out of steam as a civilization by the time of the Spanish arrival. Why not make it the Aztecs? They were even more bloodthirsty and opressive of the other groups of Mid-America. Plus it would have been much more historically accurate. Was it the lack of an known Aztec language to film it in?) I also thought that by making the Maya the “bad” guys. Gibson was able to better convey his message. If the movie was about the Spanish destroying the Maya, it would be too easy to view the movie through the old “White Colonials=bad/Indigineous People=noble savages” prism. Whereas the way Gibson framed the movie it made the much more nuanced, and in my view more relevant point, that throughout history the more powerful society has usually stomped on its weaker neighbors.
Did you notice the “title card”?
It said, paraphrasing, “no civilization has ever been destroyed from without that hadn’t already been destroying itself from within.”
I figured he was saying that the Europeans wouldn’t have taken down the native societies if they weren’t already rife with decadence and waste. Their contrast was the way of life that JP aspired too. In that framework, I think it makes sense that he included shots like the miners coughing up blood to create pigments for the rich folks, and the whole old-school reality TV sequence (torture porn, I guess we’re calling it).
Conclude what you will about what he’s saying about modern society.
And me you.
They’re two different points, but connected.
Is Gibson any more guilty of this than, say, Tarantino?
Again, agreed. The one thing is, I can see how it is hard to seperate Gibson the person from Gibson the director. Right about the time that the little girl was issuing her prophecy, I thought to myself: “Gibson you nutty Catholic fundie, you are making this movie as a propaganda piece to justify the Spanish obliteration/conversion of the Meso-American societies.” After seeing more of the movie and judging it on its own merits, I saw the main points of the movie as the ones that you and I have discussed. But again, I can see the temptation for viewers to conflate their views of Gibson with the themes of the movie.
The one thing that I don’t get is a seeming desire by some reviewers, including the author of this thread, to want to kill Gibson for his use of violence and gore. First of all, I’m no Christian, but the whole point of the Passion was to show Jesus’s suffering, the gore was appropriate. In this movie, compared to the chatter I’d heard, the gore wasn’t that over the top. Even so, the movie is about the civilization of Meso-America! This is a group that is pretty damn notorious for thier human sacrafice rituals. So again, the level of gore is appropriate in my view. Another thing is, this is a movie about the near-genocide of a small tribe by a large and powerful civilization and one man’s kill or be killed flight from that civilization. I think that it is acutually somewhat refreshing that a director show the brutual and gory consequences of this kind of thing, rather than your standard action movie neat and clean deaths. Not only does it raise the bar for realism, but in a way, is more responsible in its depictions of the consequences of violence.
It may be a bit beside the point, but the last hour really spoiled the illusion for me.
In order to suspend disbelief on the story, one has to believe that a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers has never heard of an ancient city existing within the distance an injured man can run, without food or rest, from their home turf.
Agree that the movie looked great.
Um, yes. Way. Tarantino is pretty much the anti-Mel Gibson. Instead of making pulp and selfrighteously pretending it’s High Art, Tarantino makes high art disguised as pulp. He revels in pulp. What was the title of his first big hit again? Oh yeah, Pulp Fiction. He wears his exploitation on his sleeve; Mel buries in a hat box on the top shelf of his priest’s grandmother’s closet.
OK, so because Tarantino makes zero appeal to higher motives, and gives us pure, unadulterated torture porn, he is a better filmmaker? Huh. See, I would have thought that made him a hack. (And kind of a twisted one, at that.)
I don’t have any love for Mel Gibson, but the “torture porn” criticism is utterly bogus. If you want to call him out for being an anti-Semite, or a homophobe, or a religious kook, OK, fair cop, but “torture porn”? Please. Don’t hide behind that bullshit charge.
Um, I’m not hiding behind anything, thanks anyway. I’m expressing an opinion–I didn’t like the movie–and then trying to explain it–largely because the director tries to sell us some pious bullshit about why we should respect this movie as high art, when in fact it’s just exploitation.
I’m sorry if my opinion, and my explanation, piss you off, but you’re supposed to take that kind of reaction to the pit, as I understand it, rather than getting all defensive and calling me a liar in CS.
In any case, I don’t use rules or a system of points of comparison or whatever to decide whether I like a movie or not. When I watch a movie, I either like it or I don’t. Then, after the fact, I try to figure out or explain why.
So, I do not like the way Mel Gibson presents violence, at least in his last two movies; I do not like the dishonest context he gives it. For unrelated reasons, I generally (not always) do like the way Quentin Tarantino presents violence. It’s ludicrous to insist that liking one filmmaker’s presentation of a particular facet of a movie but not liking another’s is “bullshit.”