Apocalypto:
I don't blame you, God, for being (beyond) annoyed with Mr. Gibson. Opening with the quote by W. Durant, "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within," immediately book-ends it exactly as one might suspect. First, the statement is an over-simplification of reality and fairly easily dis-proven historically. Secondly, when coupled with the ending scene of Spaniards with the crucifix, it puts the entire film right back into his Big Fat Obvious and Unrelenting Agenda.
Catholicism is never to blame! The Church is good, always has been, and when it seems like it hasn't been, that's the fault of those it overtook for already being weak.
Lord.
Anyway, the rest of it was great from a craft standpoint. Nice costumes. Um, some lovely shots. Potential for human stories. While fairly accurate according to what we now know about Mayan culture, it focused solely on the gore of it and not the 'why' or human condition of the gore. A more sane film-maker would've used this to illustrate religion exists to provide a sense of safety and control over the unknown, regardless of time, people, or place. Such a maker o' the films could easily have made the parallels, rather than seemingly miss them in comparison with today's religion and political climate. It's irresponsible and poor development to portray a culture so simplistically (whether focusing on positives or negatives). For example [slight spoiler warning]: during the solar eclipse, the Mayan high priest 'asks' that the sun return if the gods agree with his interpretation that the earth's thirst for blood has been sated...without even touching upon what phenomenal astronomers the Mayans were and that the priest most certainly knew the sun would be popping back out within moments...which would be a rather nice segue into rulers using religion to control the masses. Hello. Actual relevancy. And conveying this would've taken maybe 30-seconds more.
It was visually interesting, fairly skilled in developing a storyline with little actual material, but then this same lacking of development took away from making this nearly as relevant and human a story as it could have been.
Would someone else please do a pre-Columbian history movie, and actually delve into the empires? Come on! We have CGI and everything now. Oh, what am I saying...they'll all be cheesy - UNLESS [internal gong of happy idea] Edward Norton writes it. Would someone take this up with him? For me? Pretty please?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Sadly, they didn't even get the facts right. Pity: I really wanted to enjoy this one.
She (Julia Guernsey) has valid points. Many. There could be a little wiggle room with the carvings, arguably and especially considering that when I was very young the experts still were marveling at what a strangely peaceful and idyllic people the Maya were. Ha. THAT theory came to a sudden and definitive hault via discovery. Still, she's exactly right - it's insulting; there's no mention of achievement, and no context. Taken out of context, ours seems a horrible, confusing, senselessly violent one as well (not that it isn't at times). It's always about context, though. All writers and academics should get this, big time, if they're worth their salt.
Oh, as a small side note, it also is likely that the heads rolled down one surface while the blood of the bodies was drained down another. That is being a bit picky though, and I don't agree there's any reason to think the sacrifices were solemn. Conquest records write of an audience exuberant for public blood shed, and given public torture, battle, and execution records for centuries in both Europe and America, human nature isn't so sqeamish about this as we'd like to think.
Post a Comment