Film: Old World

SAY what you will about Mel Gibson—and whatever you want to say, it’s probably been said a few hundred times already—but he knows why people go to movie theaters. Apocalypto, his weird, wild, subtitled sojourn in the world of the late-medieval Maya, probably isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it’s the work of a filmmaker who understands exactly how to use a moving image to dazzle your eye and pin you to your seat. If you’d rather watch something more sophisticated, more verbal, more civilized, then God bless you— that’s why we’ve got DVD players, microwave popcorn, and the collected works of Woody Allen. But if you’re interested in the kind of story best told on a wall-sized screen—and you aren’t put off by a little human sacrifice and the occasional man-eating cat—then this just might be the Christmas film for you.

Apocalypto is a story of exile and return, of paradise lost and found again, compressed into four difficult days in the life of Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood, part of a cast of unknowns), a young man from a hunter-gatherer tribe who is captured by a raiding party and dragged away, along with most of his village, to the capital city of the fading Mayan imperium. In Jaguar Paw’s rainforest, life is good: A benign primitivism holds sway, a crunchy-conservative round of hunting and feasting, cheerful paganism and earthy monogamy. In the metropolis, meanwhile, civilization has rotted on the vine: There is famine and pestilence, deforestation and pollution, and the local elites have learned a trick or two from their Aztec neighbors and taken up human sacrifice to keep the masses happy.

SAY what you will about Mel Gibson—and whatever you want to say, it’s probably been said a few hundred times already—but he knows why people go to movie theaters. Apocalypto, his weird, wild, subtitled sojourn in the world of the late-medieval Maya, probably isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it’s the work of a filmmaker who understands exactly how to use a moving image to dazzle your eye and pin you to your seat. If you’d rather watch something more sophisticated, more verbal, more civilized, then God bless you— that’s why we’ve got DVD players, microwave popcorn, and the collected works of Woody Allen. But if you’re interested in the kind of story best told on a wall-sized screen—and you aren’t put off by a little human sacrifice and the occasional man-eating cat—then this just might be the Christmas film for you.

Apocalypto is a story of exile and return, of paradise lost and found again, compressed into four difficult days in the life of Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood, part of a cast of unknowns), a young man from a hunter-gatherer tribe who is captured by a raiding party and dragged away, along with most of his village, to the capital city of the fading Mayan imperium. In Jaguar Paw’s rainforest, life is good: A benign primitivism holds sway, a crunchy-conservative round of hunting and feasting, cheerful paganism and earthy monogamy. In the metropolis, meanwhile, civilization has rotted on the vine: There is famine and pestilence, deforestation and pollution, and the local elites have learned a trick or two from their Aztec neighbors and taken up human sacrifice to keep the masses happy.