Review of Apocalypto

An artistic portrayal of those in the beginning.


So let’s all just take a moment to forget that that strange, strange man Mel Gibson directed this movie and let’s just look at it as a movie shall we….

Ready? Okay.

In a film where the actors are not particularly famous I feel there is even more of a chance for the audience to become connected to the film, where as when one is constantly referring to the main character as “Keanu Reeves” instead of Bill, or Neo, a certain believability is lost. That was on thing that benefited this film. With a very ethnic feel, the film was suspenseful and lively but it really didn’t strike me as an awesome piece of cinema.

I found the beginning rather slow paced, and the ending too fast in comparison. I found the “jungle running” very repetitive and thought that the bad guys would have probably given up a long time ago. Although perhaps I am underestimating the Mayans in their thirst for revenge. I found the violence a bit overdone, but nothing we haven’t seen before or won’t see again. While the beginning was slow, I don’t think it took enough time for us to really care about the characters before we were already forced to fear for them.

In the above statement, I am however only assuming they were Mayan because it was never specifically mentioned in the story line. The only reason we knew was because sometimes in the subtitles it would say “Yelling in Mayan” or something like that. If it would have been in English (as many films set in foreign places often are) there would have been nothing in the dialogue to let us know who these people really were, other than jungle natives. But perhaps they planned it that way.

A lot of this film was rather unrealistic, I’m not sure that those are the kind of huts the Mayans really lived in, or that’s really what they would have killed for food, but it’s unrealistic ness was done in a very artistic way, which made it overall…an okay movie. I did find myself really concerned about the family in the well and hoping they make it out okay, but the ultimate end of the movie was totally unexpected (and not in a good way) and seemed very deus ex machina, something totally unrelated that they just conjured up to end the movie.

I do recommend you see this film if only to expand, in some ways, your cultural and cinematic horizons. Don’t look at it for history project research of course, but watch it to get a better understanding of who was living here before us as well as to expand your list of “not in English films”, they really can be quite good.

Overall: