Apocalypto opens in the Mesoamerican rainforest, where Jaguar Paw hunts with his father, Flint Sky, and their fellow tribesmen. They meet refugees fleeing war and devastation. Flint Sky sees the sickness in them — fear — and tells his son never to let it infect him. That warning is the whole movie in one line, and Mel Gibson knows it.
Trailer, via TrailersPlaygroundHD.
The raid that starts everything
The next morning, Maya raiders led by Zero Wolf attack the village. Many tribespeople are killed. Flint Sky dies at the hands of Middle Eye, the sadist of the group. Before Jaguar Paw is taken, he hides his pregnant wife Seven and their young son Turtles Run in an empty well. A raider spots the rope leading down and cuts it. Jaguar Paw tries to kill Middle Eye in rage over his father, and fails. Middle Eye gives him a nickname for it: “Almost.”
That is the engine of Apocalypto. A man with nothing left but a reason to run, and a movie that has to keep him running for well over two hours.
Directed by Gibson from a script he co-wrote with Farhad Safinia, Apocalypto runs 138 minutes. It is an action picture, a drama, and a history piece at once, and it is set in the Maya civilization during its decline. The dialogue is not English. It is a modern approximation of an ancient language, spoken in Yucatec Mayan with subtitles that sometimes call the language Mayan.
That choice matters more than any single set piece. It strips the film of the familiar comfort of a movie star’s voice and leaves the audience reading, watching, and keeping up. For long stretches, it works.
A march through a dying world
The raiders force the surviving adults on a long march through the jungle. The children are left behind to fend for themselves. Seven and Turtles Run stay trapped in the well, and the film never lets you forget it.
Along the way, the captives pass razed forests and vast fields of failed maize. They pass villages decimated by an unknown disease. They meet an infected little girl who prophesies the end of the Maya world. This is where Apocalypto stops being a chase and starts being something stranger and better — a travelogue through a civilization already coming apart at the seams.
The Maya city is the payoff. The captives are divided. The women are sold into slavery. The men are escorted to the top of a pyramid and sacrificed to appease the gods. Jaguar Paw is laid out on the altar.
The cast is large and largely unknown to most viewers, which helps. Rudy Youngblood plays Jaguar Paw. Raoul Max Trujillo plays Zero Wolf. Gerardo Taracena plays Middle Eye. Iazua Larios plays Sky Flower. Antonio Monroy plays Chilam. María Isabel Díaz Lago plays Mother in Law. Dalia Hernández plays Seven. Jonathan Brewer plays Blunted. Morris Birdyellowhead plays Flint Sky. Carlos Emilio Báez plays Turtles Run. Amilcar Ramírez plays Curl Nose. Israel Contreras plays Smoke Frog.
- Rudy Youngblood as Jaguar Paw
- Raoul Max Trujillo as Zero Wolf
- Gerardo Taracena as Middle Eye
- Dalia Hernández as Seven
- Morris Birdyellowhead as Flint Sky
Dean Semler shoots the jungle like a threat
The craft is the strongest argument the film has. Dean Semler’s cinematography turns the rainforest into a place that is beautiful and hostile at the same time, and the chase sequences are cut with real clarity. You always know where Jaguar Paw is, where the men hunting him are, and how much ground sits between them.
Gibson directs with a blunt sense of scale. The village raid is chaos. The pyramid is awe. The jungle is a maze that swallows people. He is not subtle, and Apocalypto does not want him to be.
The performances hold up under the weight. Youngblood carries the movie on his face and his legs, and he is asked to do a great deal of both. Trujillo gives Zero Wolf a calm that makes him worse than a shouter. Taracena’s Middle Eye is the film’s cruelest invention, and the nickname he hands out lands exactly as it should.
Principal photography took place in Mexico from November 21, 2005 to July 2006. The film was released on December 8, 2006. Buena Vista Pictures Distribution handled North America, while Icon Film Distribution handled the United Kingdom and Australia.
The prophecy and the emptiness
Early in the film, the tribe gathers around an elder who tells a story about a being consumed by an emptiness that cannot be satisfied. The being is offered all the gifts of the world and takes them anyway. He keeps taking blindly until there is nothing left to take and the world is no more.
That story is the film’s spine, and it is also where Apocalypto gets ambitious in a way its action beats cannot fully support. The movie wants the Maya decline to read as a warning about appetite without limit. It shows you the razed forests, the failed maize, the disease, the refugees. It shows you the altar. Then it hands the theme to a child’s prophecy and trusts the audience to connect the dots.
Mostly, the dots connect. Sometimes they don’t. The film is better at showing a world ending than at saying why.
What the film gets right, and what it dodges
Apocalypto is at its best when it is pure motion — a man running through a jungle he knows better than the men chasing him. It is at its weakest when it pauses to make sure you understand the point. The infected girl’s prophecy is effective as a scene and clumsy as a thesis statement.
The film was a box office success, grossing over $120 million worldwide, and it drew generally positive reviews. Critics praised Gibson’s direction, Semler’s cinematography, and the cast. That consensus is fair. The craft is real, and the commitment to the language and the setting is not a gimmick.
But the movie has a problem it never solves. It builds a hero’s journey on top of a civilization it is also condemning, and the two halves pull against each other. Jaguar Paw’s desperate break to return home and save his way of life is the emotional engine. The film’s own prophecy says that way of life is already finished. Apocalypto wants you to cheer for a man saving a world the movie has spent two hours telling you is doomed.
That tension is not a flaw exactly. It is the most interesting thing in the picture. It just never gets resolved, only outrun.
Jaguar Paw versus the idea of Jaguar Paw
Apocalypto earns its 138 minutes. The raid, the march, the city, and the chase are assembled with a craftsman’s patience, and the decision to shoot in Yucatec Mayan with subtitles gives the whole thing a texture that a star-driven version would have lost. Dean Semler’s camera does the heaviest lifting, and Rudy Youngblood holds the center without a word of English to lean on.
It is also a film that mistakes volume for depth in its final act. The prophecy is stated, restated, and then stated again through imagery, as if the audience might have wandered off during the sacrifice. Gibson trusts his camera in the jungle and stops trusting it in the temple.
The result is a strong, strange, sometimes brilliant action movie that is more comfortable with a spear than with an idea. It moves. It looks like nothing else released that year. It also never quite decides whether Jaguar Paw is a man or a symbol, and that indecision costs it.
Worth seeing for the craft alone. Worth arguing about for everything else.
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