Apocalypto

2006 was a magnificent year for film. There were so many great and interesting films that will generate much conversation and comment: films that demand careful reflection and repeat viewing.

But 2007 is not shaping up so well. 300 gave us juvenility, gore-porn, homoeroticism and an almost complete absence of plot or meaning. Then comes Apocalypto, which is longer, less visually interesting, more gratuitously violent and even duller.

This film is Rambo in the jungles of Latin America, but with less character-development and plot-depth!

By half-way through I didn’t care and by three-quarters of the way through I was laughing out loud. It really is that bad. Some of the special-effects are visually rewarding, but the music is so bad, so obvious, so unimaginative that is breathtaking. It’s a film that is best described as maniacal.

The one concession I will make is that, maybe unintentionally, the film presents an interesting apologetic. Mel Gibson is following on here from the overtly Catholic “The Passion,” with a story that blows open one of the most common arguments against religion.

You know the line – how many people have died as a result of Christianity; how many wars have been started, Christianity preaches peace but leads to bloodshed – that sort of thing. Well here we have a vision of “pre-Christianity” that is nothing short of an orgy of blood, revenge and violence. Cultic murder is inseparable from revenge murder, self-defence murder or murder for sport. Hardly idlyic or peaceful.

It quite rightly suggests that violence, terror and blood-lust speak to aspects of the human pysche more cloely linked to fear, cruelty, pleasure and the struggle to survive, aspects more universal than some critiques of Christianity would allow. The apologetic does not exhonerate institutional Christianity, far from it, but it does put its failures into a broader framework of sin and alienation. For that, if nothing else, the film is almost worth the price of admission.

[tags] Apocalypto [/tags]