[PenultimateManStanding]

Saw it last night. Overall pretty good. In the middle of the movie is the scene, about 20 minutes, that is the real reason to see this flick, the thing everybody is curious about: the reenacting of the human sacrifices from the top of the Mayan pyramid. It seemed more like an Aztec thing as it was represented. The Aztecs would sacrifice a thousand victims if the occasion was important enough. At any rate, there were heads sent bouncing down the steps, thousands cheering. Fantastic sets and costumes with jade and tourquoise jewelry, tattoos; astonishing film making really. The Mayan priests and aristocrats seemed too creepy, the whole scene was too creepy. My guess is that the reality was not so sordid, human sacrifice notwithstanding, but it's Mel's show. The reason I say that is because the Mayans' culture was an acheivement and I felt it should have been shown with more dignity; I don't say that to be politically correct, their accomplishments were profound as you can read for yourself, and they were probably more refined than shown in Gibson's film. However, it is supposed to be around 1519, when the Spaniards made their appearance in Yucatan, and the great days of the Maya had ended 600 years in the past, so perhaps it's supposed to be sordid. There were still some cities in 1519, but the great culture was long dead.

The film otherwise is a pastiche of old Hollywood flicks: Cornell Wilde in The Naked Prey, John Wayne in Green Berets, Gibson's own Braveheart, Stallone in Firstblood, even some army ants echoing The Naked Jungle. If you look carefully, you'll see Schwartzenegger's Predator.

{merged pms's thread with this previously existing one and moved this thread from current energy to open discussion - TheTurtle}

[PenultimateManStanding]

I see what you mean, Turtle. Nobody seems to have anything intelligent to say about it. It is in many way a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but it doesn't measure up to Braveheart by a wide measure. I was impressed by the acting of the Mayan players. They seemed to be consumate professionals, but they had no experience in acting. I'm supposing that Gibson had a big part in this: how to get a select group of inexperienced players to excell.

[Revi]

I lived with the Mayans for 2 and 1/2 years in the 80's. We used to have a ceremony for the water tanks we built. They sacrificed a turkey and used the blood to make crosses on the tanks. Interesting blending of christian and mayan religion. Their culture had it's heyday 1000 years ago. Now they live sustainably as corn farmers. We are more like the brash culture Mel Gibson is depicting in the film. We need sacrifices, for the great god oil.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Revi', 'I') lived with the Mayans for 2 and 1/2 years in the 80's. We used to have a ceremony for the water tanks we built. They sacrificed a turkey and used the blood to make crosses on the tanks. Interesting blending of christian and mayan religion. Their culture had it's heyday 1000 years ago. Now they live sustainably as corn farmers. We are more like the brash culture Mel Gibson is depicting in the film. We need sacrifices, for the great god oil.

[abelardlindsay]

Why the Mayans Collapsed:

Gibson (Apocalypto): They devolved into inhumanity when their crops wouldn't grow. They should have lived sustainably like the tribe in the forest.

Jared Diamond (Colapse): They degraded the environment on which they needed to survive.

Joeseph Tainter (Collapse of Complex Societies): They ran into diminishing marginal returns in their agricultural methods as their population expanded and they tried to farm more marginal lands. Their reaction to this was to increase totalitarianism, temple building and wars (similar to what the Romans did) which further accelerated the negative marginal returns on their investment in complexity leading to general revulsion among the population and a collapse to simpler levels of societal organization.

As Tainter correctly points out, environmental degradation is a SYMPTOM of diminishing marginal returns, and hence societal collapse and not the CAUSE. So if you get environmental degradation it shows your civilization is doing something wrong but fixing the degradation on its own is not going to always keep the civilization from collapsing. For instance, Rome did not have an environmental degradation problem when it collapsed. Similarly a techno-fix, such as the British inventing the steam engine will mitigate collapse when the environment has been degraded . The degradation of the environment in Britain's case was the deforestation of Britian for heating fuel, prior to mined coal becoming viable as an energy source thanks to the steam engine.Gibson mashes up Christianity with Diamond's ideas. I think the problem with Tainter is that he's a difficult author but he makes his point with enormous amounts of footnotes and data while collapse is easier reading and not as dissonant with modern environmentalist thinking.

[Revi]

We spent some time at the Mayan Temples of Tikal. They were surrounded by jungle. One of the most beautiful places on earth is atop temple four. It hasn't been cleared of jungle on the bottom, so we climbed up through it, and emerged on a big platform, suspended above the canopy. The other temples were visible, and scarlet macaws flew around them. It was a vision of a civilization that was reclaimed by nature. Afterwards we ate in a small restaurant run by Kekchi Mayans. (the culture of people I worked with) They spoke the Mayan language, lived in the same way as their ancestors. I felt like I was in a time warp a lot of the time, but I'm not sure if it was a glimpse of the future or of the past.

[oowolf]

Alex Jones liked it:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/de ... alypto.htm

I may actually go to the movie theatre to see this one. I haven't watched a movie in a theatre since 1993. Not a big movie fan. I've only watched 2 new films in the last year--the German film about the last days of Hitler "Downfall" and "An Inconvenient Truth".

I don't just watch gloomy films though--In the last month I've had a Ginger Rogers festival: "42nd Street", "Flying Down to Rio", and "Gold Diggers of 1933" wherein Rogers spontaneously improvises "We're In The Money" in Pig-Latin (and virtually naked, these pre-code films are amazingly risque)--hilarious! Rogers is definitely underrated as an actress, her brilliant work with Astaire notwithstanding.
http://www.moviediva.com/MD_root/review ... rs1933.htm

Now, back to doom and dieoff,

[seldom_seen]

I saw it last night. I would describe it as Dances With Wolves meets the Road Warrior, but not as good as either.

The movie was entertaining and suspenseful, but I went in to the theater hoping for an historical epic, so I was little let down.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('seldom_seen', 'I') saw it last night. I would describe it as Dances With Wolves meets the Road Warrior, but not as good as either.

The movie was entertaining and suspenseful, but I went in to the theater hoping for an historical epic, so I was little let down.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('seldom_seen', 'I') saw it last night. I would describe it as Dances With Wolves meets the Road Warrior, but not as good as either.

The movie was entertaining and suspenseful, but I went in to the theater hoping for an historical epic, so I was little let down.

[BlisteredWhippet]

Its not particularly surprising that a spectacular achievement like apocalypto would be utterly lost on most people. As seldom_seen reveals, he cannot remove his Hollywood goggles when he goes into a movie theater. For him, the hollywood spectacle is a bifurcated hallucination where familiar Judeo-Christian mythology is distilled through our constellation of "stars".

Would it be too much to ask S_s to indulge a little bit? Maybe put his pants on without underwear, chew a cocoa leaf and ingest a little magic mushroom? Paint his face and sneak in through the exit doors and try to appreciate the story on its own merits? His main problem is that he is looking for Jesus and cannot find him. "History" is an intellectual exercise in delving into the prejudices of the modern age. History, written by and interpreted by the Dead White Christian. Faced with animistic mythologisms, such analysis is as inappropriate as looking for Rhodes Scholars among Miss America contestants.

The Mestizos, for instance, the people of the central American forests and the decendensts of indigenous people, will recieve this movie and reverently recognize its themes and status as a modern-day allegory, an iconic (no pun) mythology produced by one of the most endangered species on the planet: a pagan storyteller.

The most significant aspect of this film (as well as most if not all of its central themes) are unrecognizable by most people of the 1st world. Through their Judeo-Christian blinders, they see only the Hollywoodisms. Lost in the jungle, they reach for the shadows on Platos wall of the things with which they are familiar. Most people are too thick to even begin to comprehend the latent quality of most of the elements of storytelling in most movies and other stories. The finely crafted narrative that the movie constructs within many parallel levels of meaning are lost, utterly lost. The comments here only testify to the modern imagination's need to flatten conceptualizations into broad, meaningless themes. The movie is dismissed throughout the media as an uncomplex action-adventure narrative.

Hundreds of American movie reviews laud the Action, the Chase, the Redemption. They collapse the entire spectacle into Good vs. Evil. They have no idea what to make of the film. This is because they can only see it with the Western Eye.The pagan aspects of the film are ignored as "bloody", "gory", "violent", and for some simpering Judeo-Christian commentators "unnecessary". Please have mercy, Mel.

This is the third installment of a pagan-themed movie from Mel's production company. He IS the drunken Dionysis at the cultural party, alternately spiking the punch and running around shirtless with the lampshade over his head, as the disapproving cultural intelligensia perhaps starting to doubt their innate wisdom as Masters of the Universe for sending out his invitation.

Braveheart was a bitterly pagan celebration, with the practically neolithic Scots fighting the corrupt of England. Thier mud huts, passion, and wildness are the pagan instinct that Christianity tried to stamp out, which even today exists teeming at the edges of "civilizen life". The public's fascination with Mel and his movies is the ritual echoes of a more vital time, when humans did not wander around in an existential dilemma, surrounded by toasters and gas stations. The public was fascinated by the account of a man whose life was lived fully, utterly, for principle. They were fascinated by his unclean pagan facepaint, the magic realism of mythology played out onscreen. The Passion of the Christ was successful because it resurrected the pagan reality of Christianity. The bloody spectacle of human suffering, central to its practices but excised from modern, sanitized experience, rose again like a zombie to flesh out the completely plasticized romanticization of modern religion.

Apocalypto fails to produce recognizable cultural landmarks for a population of postmodern idiot savants. Not one reviewer I saw recognized the multiple messages in the movie, or recognized its greatness. Some recognized the virtuosity, and that was as close as they got.

It is interesting that Mel's pagan mythologies been tangled with Judeo-Christian social forces. His drunken monolouge was blown out of proportion, but that outcome makes perfect sense for a Judeo-Christian culture. In such a culture, the unconscious rules of intellectual behavior become transparently indicative of their origins, whenever the truth-teller, the mythologizer, the storyteller appears. As opposed to scientism, human emotional experience is pattern-oriented. And that standard for truth-tellers is archtyped in Jesus Christ, or Moses, or any of the other prophetic mouthpieces for God described in Bible.

Thus, Mel "fell from grace". The Christians have nervously sprung to their feet to condemn him as less-than-Jesus, as the Jews have certified him as a non-Jehovah. Postmodern mass media and the body politic in general, as the secular monopolist of mass cultural mythology, "diagnoses" Mel. Underneath it all though, is the quest for Jesus as Truth-Teller. All who speak "Truth", or something that sounds like it, must be compared directly or indirectly, to Jesus Christ himself. I call this the "Fallacy of Searching For Christ." Its sort of like an ad hominem, but one that disguises its origins in various intellectual modes. They crucify Mel to prove he is not Jesus.

The astonishing truths about nature, about civilizations, the difference between anarchic hunter-gatherers and Earth-tilling cultures, the basic human condition, and the meta-messages of myth, and myth-making are shown right in front of our faces in this movie. It is not surprising to me that most people will not see these things. They miss the pagan forest for the Judeo-Christian trees.

For Mel's part, I think he has intelligently retreated from defending himself against the masses of people armed with stones. Ironically he has become a greater artist than any other director in Hollywood today. He has become the solitary artist working for himself, a true pagan demigod, creating meaning outside the official culture's petri dish.

His blank, blood-rimmed stare at the mugshot camera is Dionysis staring into the paper-thin soul of America. It is a face that says, "I am the dragon, I see you for what you are." It is the kind of face that makes Christians drop to their knees and pray, good folks lock their doors at night, and cops to come back around to surveill the area.

Behind that bloody stare is a visonary that can bring to life a life, outside the frontiers of culture, a place chased from the edges of civilization, that may only authentically exist now in mythology. The tragedy of our civilization is that our mythology, unlike pagan mythology or the mythology inherent in this movie, is that the vital aspect is sanitized and neutralized. Our cultural milieu is impoverished, addicted to the trappings of its own delusion. Mel will continue to fascinate the nation as long as behind the tinsel, glitter, and empty plastic sentiment of Santy Claus and his Elves, remains the story of a half-man, half-god, who was ritualistically tortured, disembowled, and nailed to a chunk of wood to die, after which he comes back to life to haunt the living world. The pagan realities of the archaic animism of hunter-gatherer cultures that Judeo-Christian and pre-Judeo/Christian farming, land-tilling, animal-husbanding cultures destroyed, are co-opted, sublimated, but never fully extinguished. Apocalypto is the undead heart of animism still alive and twitching, transplanted and sewn into our collective body.



Movie Review: Apocalypto
out of 5.

[PenultimateManStanding]

So you liked the movie BW, great! I get the hunter-gatherer thing. hunter-gatherer: good, tiller of the earth: bad. There was the interesting mythologizing scene where the one-armed old man told the story of how man gathered the strengths of the various animals but still was empty, so I guess that's what you mean by animism. I do get the impression that Mel is up to speed with the nervous zeitgeist, but so was James Cameron when he made his allegorical flicks, The Terminator and Titanic. It's a commonplace theme nowadays, so you shouldn't work yourself up to a slaver of froth over this flick. This, to me, was nowhere near as good as the earlier two movies of Gibson's you mentioned. Far too derivative, mostly just a pastiche of older Hollywood flicks. Sorry to disagree with such a worthy reviewer as yourself, but I give it only 4 stars. I do agree with you that Gibson is an extreme talent though. I was very impressed with his acting in The Bounty many years ago where Anthony Hopkins played Captain Bligh and Gibson played Fletcher Christian.

[mercurygirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BlisteredWhippet', 'H')e IS the drunken Dionysis at the cultural party, alternately spiking the punch and running around shirtless with the lampshade over his head, as the disapproving cultural intelligensia perhaps starting to doubt their innate wisdom as Masters of the Universe for sending out his invitation.

[PenultimateManStanding]

BW is completely wrong about Gibson. Gibson is a devout Christian, but he is also a filmmaker. The idea that Gibson is a pagan is ludicrous.

[seldom_seen]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BlisteredWhippet', 'I')ts not particularly surprising that a spectacular achievement like apocalypto would be utterly lost on most people. As seldom_seen reveals, he cannot remove his Hollywood goggles when he goes into a movie theater. For him, the hollywood spectacle is a bifurcated hallucination where familiar Judeo-Christian mythology is distilled through our constellation of "stars".

[Falconoffury]

At what reading level does one need to be at in order to understand BlisteredWhippet's post? I had some trouble there.

[BlisteredWhippet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'B')W is completely wrong about Gibson. Gibson is a devout Christian, but he is also a filmmaker. The idea that Gibson is a pagan is ludicrous.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BlisteredWhippet', '
')As Dylan said, "You shouldn't let someone else get your kicks for you".

[BlisteredWhippet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BlisteredWhippet', '
')As Dylan said, "You shouldn't let someone else get your kicks for you".