What a weird movie. But weirder still is how far the critics are again completely off the mark. Seriously, what a bunch of dumb fucks. Apocalypto is not about "The fall of the Mayan Empire" as some of them wrote. Those pretentious fuckers always want to act like their working on some grand, intellectual interpretation. But the truth is that Apocalypto is a movie about a guy running around in the jungle trying to escape from six or seven other guys. That's it. There's nothing else.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is all old news. Apocalypto came out in the US like six months ago. But it just came here to Peru, so I just got to see it, and I have the benefit of seeing it after the initial tidal wave of knee-jerk responses. Blessed with that perspective, I see what a bunch of idiots virtually everybody is.
For example, I hear the historians of the world are all pissed off. They're sitting around crying saying...Oh, the Mayan empire wasn't bloodthirsty like the movie portrayed.
What?
What about those damn temples with the bloodstains that can still be seen to this day because of human sacrifices. That's no secret, that shit happened. Yeah, sure, I bet there was a whole facet of the Mayan civilization that dealt with nothing other than a mother's love for her children, but the same thing is true about the Nazi regime, and nobody bitches when they're systematically portrayed as ruthless murderers.
The reality is that all historians are fat old dipshits that nobody wants to hang out with, so, just like Trekkies, they've buried themselves in the myth of a civilization that they can dream about and think "oh, if only I had lived in the Mayan empire, I would have been loved and accepted." Then Mel comes along and shows them a truthful version of the Mayan empire that suggests they, the historians, would have been outcasts there as well, and they start to bitch and cry that their paradise has been broken.
Grow the fuck up.
When you cut out somebody's heart to make the crops grow, it ain't pretty. Civilizations that did that were bloodthirsty, primitive, and full of shit frankly. I mean this whole cultural attitude that we should tilt our head in adorable acceptance in response to this absolute, misguided brutality is absurd. It happened OK, get over it.
But all that said, the movie really has nothing to do with the Mayans, it could have just as easily been set in downtown New York. One set of gangs kidnaps another, or any other fantastical situation, it's a fucking chase movie, nothing more, nothing less. And as a chase movie, it was OK.
You know what's weird though? Why is Mel so concerned about having the movie be in some primitive, dead language, but then he has the characters say shit that no jungle people ever would have said. You know, I've visited Amazon jungle people and the one thing I noticed about them was how quiet they are. I mean, it was hard for me to even talk to them in a voice that was silent enough. They consider people like us to be disrespectfully loud, and if you ever go to the Amazon, you'll understand why. The Amazon is a living thing, when you're there you get the impression that it can reach up and crush you at will.
Well, shit, maybe Mayans weren't the same as Amazon jungle people who fucking knows?
Was Apocalypto worth seeing...actually I could have done without it to be honest. Of course, I've been through a similar chase sequence/saved by an eclipse type deal so there were no surprises in it for me.
The End