There's a rather interesting write-up in the Wash. Post, and after reading it, I couldn't help thinking that Mel Gibson certainly loves to root for the underdog who fights back with a vengeance. He plays them in movies, and he even reinterprets the Bible in his Jesus movie in a way that mocks what Jesus stood for, which, for those who have forgotten, is about forgiveness, not vengeance.
Anyway, someone needs to tap the chappie on the shoulder and tell him that he's no underdog, no one is repressing him nor exploiting him. The man owns his own friggin island, for God's sake. And the irony? The irony is that the closest thing we have to Mel Gibson's blood-thirsty Mayans in his Apocalypto movie are the Republicans and their pre-emptive strike foreign policy. Mel Gibson's movie is a movie about bad judgment by bad people who run their government and how it pisses off the people repressed by them. That's my take.
'Apocalypto': Driven by A Hunter's Gut Instincts
The scene and time demand some explication. It's Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in vaguely pre-Columbian times, in that seemingly endless epoch when the mighty Mayan city-states ruled supreme and took their pleasures from the land and surrounding peoples with no thought to consequence or brotherhood. They were rulers; everyone else was naked prey.
Our hero is no city Maya, however. He is one Jaguar Paw (brilliant, supple, expressive Rudy Youngblood), of an indigenous forest people. Certainly Gibson over-romanticizes this hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In a Potemkin village of surpassing beauty, these happy children of innocence cavort like so many Rima the Bird Girls, chattering in Yucatek (which subtitles translate into a kind of hardy peasant English, bringing to mind Frodo and his mates), joking healthily about sex, living in perfect monogamy in warm little family units under the watchful eye of the benevolent patriarch Flint Sky. Under it, I could see folk memories of Middle Earth or even, for God's sake, Winnetka.
Gibson makes decisions to tell certain forgotten truths. The opening sequence depicts a team bringing down a tapir: The movie gets not merely the necessity of the hunt, and the agony of the beast, but the exhilaration. And when these rangy guys begin the alchemy of butchery by which a corpse becomes meat, Gibson forces you (PETA people, not you ) to feel what they feel: My name will be sung at the tribal fires tonight, my children will go to bed with full bellies, and I will probably get laid.
But this is all about to end. One morning -- the portents have been over-dramatic -- the Mayans arrive in force. And why, you wonder, would the Forest People not even have heard of them and made no preparations, as they are about two days' march from a Mayan urban center? The only answer is that it suits the political agenda of the picture, which is to subvert notions about the "innocence" of native peoples and the "guilt" of usurpers from the outside. In other words, in Gibson's worldview, the Mayans are to the Forest People exactly as, sometime later, the Spaniards would be to the Mayans. It's all a question of empire prerogative
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/07/AR2006120701947.html
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