Apocalimp.

Film Title: Apocalypto.

AKA : Bungle in the Jungle!

Synopsis: Filthy savages are attacked by filthier savages, resulting in a young hunter (don't you dare call him a 'gatherer') being separated from his hole-loving family. The young hunter escapes the filthier savages' ritualistic decapitation sacrifices to the Slinky(TM) Gods, only to spend the last hour of the movie pretending he's in Predator.

The previews for this movie are hugely misleading. I walked in expecting an exploitative, emotionally manipulative cautionary tale and ended up sitting through an overconfident action flick. I'm suffering from the same kind of disappointment I had when I walked out of Lady in the Water. When a director's persona becomes larger than life, I'm always excited to see how it'll affect his work. In both cases, the directors seem to have tempered their first impulses in order to make their work more palatable to an audience that is growing increasingly skeptical of the directors' personal philosophy, which is a real shame. Although Apocalypto isn't as horribly schizophrenic as Lady, it still feels like a empty follow-up film that sells itself based on controversy and ultimately never follows through on its promise.

To be clear, I didn't think Passion of the Christ was as preachy as it could have been. For a film based on the New Testament, there was surprisingly little theological or philosophical meaning to be derived. If you discovered something spiritually significant in Passion, it's probably something you were carrying with you when you entered the theater. Besides a few Beatitudes rushed in at the end, there's not much going on besides a severe Catholic guilt trip.

That being said, the reason Passion worked for me is because I accepted it as a guilt trip. I liked the idea that Mel Gibson was so full of himself that he wanted to make Christians around the world feel bad about themselves for not constantly considering how much blood Jesus squirted when they scourged him. Although there was nothing incredibly cerebral happening within the film, the purpose of its creation and the subsequent reaction to it created a phenomenon. While it'd be selfish of me to expect Gibson to impact people similarly a second time around, especially when he's dealing with material that people have less readily available opinions on, I would have appreciated some sense of purpose in Apocalypto, other than the near retarded moralistic simplicities voiced by its characters.

Despite the savagery often depicted in Apocalypto, Gibson takes very pointed steps to make the characters on both sides of the violence human at key moments. Which is boring. Really, really boring. The question I kept asking myself throughout Apocalypto, is 'why is Mel Gibson dealing with this material at all?' I wanted to find an answer that satisfied this movie's existence as a solitary entity, and as the follow-up to Passion, but aside from a few lame moments of Christ-imagery, there's very little to speak of. Even if I didn't agree with his stance (which wouldn't surprise me) I'd rather Mel Gibson take a stance than force us to sit through the dull formula of a chase movie without any surprises or twists along the way.

Outside of my unwillingness to accept this movie as philosophically hollow, consider it thusly: It's crappy as an action movie too. By the three-quarter point, you realize that this movie has taken a decidedly Home Alone method of dispatching its villains, and while the protagonist's counter-attacks are occasionally exciting, it doesn't make up for the fact that it all feels tired. What doesn't help the absence of story is the sluggish pacing in exposition. Apparently Gibson has little faith in his audience of discerning critical facts from his shots. Rather than showing the audience a single gruesome disemboweling and beheading in a key climactic sequence, Gibson shows it to us again in nearly the same way, undermining the impact of the violence altogether. The redundancy of shots is like clockwork; if you see one person looking confused, chances are they're about to shoot a confused glance at another character, who responds in turn, allowing Gibson to cut back to the first confused glance. If we're lucky, a group of characters might look at something disturbing, like a gruesome wall painting, giving Gibson the opportunity to cut between several confused people, the torture depicted in artwork, the characters again--they don't quite get it, the artwork--maybe now with a decapitated head, the people again--what could this all mean?!--and so on and so forth. For a movie that rarely relies on dialogue to tell its story, its incredible how visually uninspired and obvious its shots are. Half the time I was so disengaged that I would sit back and debate which special effects were animatronic and which were CG.

Aside from some comically gratuitous moments of violence, there's very little memorable or specific to keep Apocalypto separate from any other chase-movie. Even if you wasted your time analyzing the symbolic meanings of events, it wouldn't get you much farther intellectually than a Spark Notes summary of The Scarlet Letter. Gibson missed an opportunity to stay atop his high-horse, providing formula where fervor would have easily been more watchable.