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2006-12-09 - 2:07 a.m.

Vengeance is mine Sayeth Mel Gibson
Apocalypto


Wow, that was astonishingly bad.


Not as astonishingly bad as Casino Royal was, but only because I didn�t keep checking my watch hoping it would end soon, and then only because I wasn�t wearing my watch.

Spoiler Warning, I�m going to try and convince you to save your money, if you really want to go see it, don�t read any further.

Oh, and this post is very long.


Vengeance is mine sayeth Mel Gibson.

Really the guy needs to work out his issues, and preferable not by making anymore sadistic revenge movies. I have to admit that I was surprised that he made �The Passion� instead of say �Revelation� (good revenge material in there, what with the smiting of Babylon and all.) Better yet �Ezekiel� or �The Macabees�

No wait, this is Mel �I hate Jewish people� Gibson so I guess those stories are out.

So where does a filmmaker that has pissed of the entire Hollywood community go to make his next big movie? South America I guess. Next year we can expect a remake of �Nanuk of the North�

Part of why I�m bothering to write this review is that I felt this film had the potential of being very good. So Pros:

Good cast. It cannot be easy to find that many unknown actors, (I wonder if there are not a lot of North American Indian actors thrown in the mix) Some of the performances are quite good, others not so much, but nothing to detract from the film.

The cinematography was good, but could have been much better. Editing was pretty bad, aside from the story the editing really served to weaken the film more than anything.

But then there is that story�and two of the worst deus ex machina ever filmed.


Wow.

I won�t dwell too long on the problem Mel had with trying to compare and contrast his idyllic village folk with their blood thirsty city dwelling cousins, who apparently are of the same culture and language, and live only three days walk away. However, if you are being chased through the jungle by the bad guys, then a jaguar, then the bad guys and a jaguar, you can make the trip in a day and a half even if you do have a spear in your side. *more on that later*

So the movie begins, a tapir (big pig) is being chased through the forest by a band of hunters, into a boar trap where it is impaled. Then the hunters divvy up porky while playing practical jokes on each other. So far so good, I�m interested; the portrayal of the natives (can�t think of a better non-condescending way to say the �indigenous people of south America�) is nice in that it breaks from the �stoic noble savage� image right of the bat. These guys are having fun, they laugh, ect ect

Then they meet another group of natives� (lets just say �foreshadowing� )... who do everything but say �Run for your lives!!!� �well actually they do, but it is in a dream sequence just a few minutes away.

Then there is a happy village scene, (most of the films bad acting happens here,) complete with everyone sitting around the fire listening to an old guy tell stories. not a great story, but it has to continue the feeling of ominous dread that the meeting with the others set up.

I�m still in favor of the movie at this point.

Next morning, our hero has his ominous dream, and awakes to dog barking, intercut with a band of warriors creping towards the village. These are serious hardcore Mayan warriors, with fearsome headdress, bone piercings, tattoos, body scarification, weapons you name it, they just have �baddass written all over them. (the peaceful villagers all have a lot of body modification going on too, but nothing as aggressive as these dudes) Now back to our hero and the barking dog, which is then silenced (ominously) Then cut back to the warriors, who line up prepared to strike� there is a really great moment of anticipation�

You should leave the theater now because this is the best moment of the film. It is all down hill from here.

Now comes the village raid which goes on for-ev-er. It is all the stock �village raid� footage, burn the huts, ravage the women, burn the huts, ravage the women, burn the huts�

It�s like �OK Mel, we get it.�

Our hero lowers his very pregnant wife down a round chasm, hole, cave thingy that has lots of stalactites and such, (it is a pretty wired kind of out of place thing, anyway�) He promises to come back for them, ties the rope to a tree and runs back to help fight off the warriors who are still burning huts and ravaging the women.

He fights, he�s captured, he accidentally gives away his dad, who is killed in front of him in a scene straight out of braveheart (another one of Mel�s fetishes I guess) and almost gives away his wife�s hiding place, but the warrior only stops to toss a boulder down the pit and cut the rope. (Now they are trapped!)

I started to loose faith somewhere in the village raid scene, but at this point I still have hope for the movie.

Then there is the death march that goes on for-ev-er

Again, we get it. It sucks to be tied by the neck to a bamboo pole with six of your friends and marched half way across South-America. There is a strangely out of context tree felling/midnight cowboy tribute? scene, then there is a really poorly done �ominous foreshadowing prophetic scene� One of the bad guys is especially sadistic, he�s the one who slit Dude's fathers throat and tortures his friends ect, at some point he stops being credible, he is just a little too evil. It is like all the terrible things are pinned on him and the rest of the guys are just doing their jobs, honest slave hunters you know. He is like the really bad prison camp guard who makes the others seem like alright Joes just caught up in the machine.

Somewhere along the brazil death march, the film lost me and I went from thinking it might pull it out in the end to hoping it wouldn�t end as badly as I now expected.

Finally they encounter �the city� which is a writing shantytown of religious fanatics, slaves, slave markets, butcher shops exotic animal sellers, ect with a few noblewomen and men here and there. It just didn�t really work for me. Everything was too much and over the top, too busy, too crowded, to much squalor, whatever. The women are split off and sold; the men are painted blue and led off to the temple to get sacrificed.

Honestly I�ve told you all this just to set up this next scene.

Our hero and his blue friends are led up the side of the pyramid on a wooden scaffold, while heads and bodies are tossed down the stone steps on the front. (I�m no Mayan scholar, but why build a big beautiful stone pyramid, and then tack a crappy wooden scaffold to the side to lead your sacrifice up to the top? isn�t there a back way or something, I don�t know if this was the filmmakers or history but ..oh nevermind)

Our band of smurfs arrive at the top to see all the high court of the Mayan empire, arrayed in the finest jade and such, and all looking more or less crazy. Only the high priest is actually babbling and doing his best bedlam act, everyone else just looks a bit psychopathic. (I get it, no rational person could believe in human sacrifice, except they would have been much more ominous If they didn�t look like simpletons)

Now it is important that I take a moment to stress a point. These people worship the SUN. There is a panoply of other gods, but the SUN is where it is at. Again while this is not my area of expertise, I do remember some things. Like the fact that they built huge stone pyramids, aligned with the SUN, that on certain SOLAR events cast shadows on certain other symbolic buildings and all kinds of crazy things like that. I know that they had a very advanced SOLAR calendar, carved in stone on the side of the damn pyramids. These people were all about the SUN.

Ok. back to our guys on the top of the pyramid about to get sacrificed so that the sun god will make it rain because there has been a drought.

In a series of execution scenes, (very similar to braveheart) our guys are cut open and their hearts are ripped out before their heads are cut off, and the head and the body are tossed down the steps of the pyramid. At one point we get a point of view shot from a severed head rolling around the floor. (Apparently in an earlier cut the POV shot continued all the way down the stairs, look for that in the �Directors Cut�) the whole scene on top of the Pyramid was handled poorly. It could have been exceptional, but in the end it was just campy gore and there was a lot of nervous laughter in the theater. Not the mood I think he was going for.

Now this may be silly, but I noticed it and so did a couple of other folks. The camera dwells on one of the freshly �ripped� out hearts. The dude, cuts the abdomen, reaches up and �rips� the heart right out. The heart, (about five feet wide) on the screen is quite anatomically correct with nice veins and arteries hanging off it, all of the CUT CLEANLY AT RIGHT ANGLES TO THE SAME LENGTH. I feel silly even commenting on it, but damn it if you are going to spend screen time on a bloody human heart at least get it right.

OK first, anyone who thinks you can just reach up through the abdomen and rip out someone heart has never gutted a deer. But come one, you spent untold millions on this movie, and you made a editorial choice to show the heart on screen several times, and nobody mentioned, �Uhh, if he ripped it out wouldn�t the arteries be all torn and ragged? Because several people sitting around me noticed too.

But wait�.

So our hero is led up to the alter pillar thing, and stretched out ala William Wallace, the executioner raises the blade�

How will he be saved!!!!


BY AN UNEXPECTED SOLAR ECLIPSE.


I mentioned that these people worship the sun right? had solar calendars that rival ours and such, remember?

Cut to the crowd, �Oh my!!!, Holy Sh*t! What is happening to the sun!!!????� �Ahh panic!�


Pl�ease!!! These people were all about eclipses! they had special celebrations and crap. The high priests and everyone are all "Ahhh,, Holy Sh*t! the Sun!!!"

So our hero is spared, (�because God has been satisfied by our sacrifice, look! he is giving back the sun!�) Only to be used as target practice by the guys who captured him in the first place.

Blah Blah Blah� He ends up killing the bad chiefs son, and the chase is on.

And what a chase. the second half of the movie is one guy running through the jungle, being chased by six other guys running through the jungle. Mind you he had a spear driven completely through his side (see target practice above) the point of which he used to kill the bad cheifs sun, (I guess he pulled the rest fo the spear our but they never showed this) and he just came off the Brazil death march, while our warriors are fit and healthy but brother manages to always stay ahead of them, and a JAGUAR, which chases him for about a half mile, always about ten feet behind him (I swear that the editor used the exact same piece of jaguar chase footage more than once)


Finally the bad guys catch up and are chasing him along with the jaguar, until one dude stops and gets his face eaten off (very gratuitously) by a stuffed jaguar head. (it looked pretty 1970�s rubber monster suit)

But the chase continues� they run past the camera, they run towards the camera, they run away from the camera, the camera runs with them, they run over the camera...over and over. It is like in Conan where they start running across the wasteland, and they run for about a week. Seasons come and go and they are still running.

The running with the great big hole in your abdomen is explained by him grasping his side and gasping in pain a lot, though that gets forgotten pretty quickly, and to tell you the truth if I were being chased by a jaguar I would run pretty damn fast too, but these guys are running for DAYS.

These guys start running in the morning, then it is afternoon and they are running, then it is nighttime and they are running with torches, then it is morning, and they are still running full out, always about 50 yards behind the dude.

They all jump over a water fall, and then they run some more.

Intercut with the marathon are scenes of dudes wife and kid still in the hole, Remember the wife and kid stuck down a hole? They are still there. At one point she clubs a monkey to death with a broken stalactite, now she is trying to make a grappling hook with the rope and her monkey club.

Back to our hero, who has decided that this is his forest damn it, and he goes all Rambo and starts killing off the bad guys. This chase hunt/takes him right back to the village.

Suddenly it starts to rain, pouring rain, cut back to the wife and son, �OH NO the cave thingy is filling up with water!" For about a second I was worried, then I thought, �well if it fills with water it will just float them right out of there won�t it? Problem solved.� But we can�t have that, spoil the tension, so instead of having them say something like �Oh no I can�t swim we are going to drown� Mel decided to�. but wait back to the hero.

He finally dispatches the chief bad guy, with the boar trap (never saw that one coming) though the chief shoots him in the chest with an arrow, and then with the last two dudes still in hot pursuit, brother runs straight for� the beach?

(There is a little tingle in the back of my mind here, �Mel wouldn�t do that would he?�)

He runs out there and drops to his knees, apparently in defeat, the bad dudes run up behind him in slow motion (that is something else I forgot to mention, half of this movie is in slow motion, if they played the whole thing at full speed it would only be about 45 minutes long) The raise their clubs to strike when suddenly they stop!

The camera begins to pan slowly toward the ocean. (Yep He is going to go there)

There are the Spanish ships with hairy white guys rowing ashore. The two bad guys are awestruck and walk past the dude that they have been chasing halfway across south America, and that has killed their chief, and all their friends, and go down to the beach to say hello.

(Conquistadors or not, if you make me chase you across Brazil, I�m bringing and ass whooping with me.)

But cut back to the Wife!!! Not only can she not swim but �


She goes into what might be the shortest labor ever, and gives birth right then and there.

To quote a reviewer who said it better than I ever could

�This fateful coming ashore, by the way, transpires at the same instant when the fugitive's wife, gasping for air and hoisting her toddler atop her shoulders as their crevasse fills with water, gives birth to her child in an underwater effects shot that had my preview audience howling in their seats. Childbirth, improbably enough, is the rare human experience that Gibson doesn't associate with blood and mess. The incongruous, pretty-as-a-peach sanctification of her stalwart fertility is the springboard by which Apocalypto vaults from its pitiless mimesis of torture to a jaw-dropping embrace of kitsch�


Yep, she moans, gives a good hard push and out pops the baby. Several people, around me voiced what I was thinking at the exact same moment.

Oh---My---God

At first I was like no, she is just having a contraction right? OH, Nope, there is the head�and the shoulders�

�And the baby floating around still attached�. in the clear water. (Though in all honesty, thank you Mel for not making that any more realistic)

So our hero runs back to the hole thinking his wife and kid are goners only to find them bobbing at the surface, (I guess she could swim after all) with the baby (still attached) They fade away but I can just see the situation.

Her �Here take the baby!�
Him �Umm, can you cut that thing or something�
Her �do you have a knife�
Him �No, I lost it, but wait� I�ll use this arrow that is still sticking out of my chest�



Final scene our new family trudging off into the forest to make a new life. (he has moss stuck in the arrow hole)


Holy CRAP! I�m awestruck by how bad this was. And as bad as I made it sound, it is worse when you actually see it.

And some people are going to love this movie. I�ve already seen great reviews of it. Or course 95% of the reviews I�ve seen for Casino Royal were positive too so what the hell do I know.

-Justus

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