Yet for all Gibson's attention to accuracy, there are many aspects that just don't jibe. Gibson shrewdly uses Native American and Mayan Indians as actors and employs subtitles to translate the minimal dialogue, which is delivered in the dialect currently spoken by the Mayan descendents on the Yucatan.
APOCALYPTO MOVIE
The movie is taken up with the physical trek into slavery, the spectacle of the human sacrifices in the strange urban center, and an escape that inches forward in a constantly changing balance of power and wits. Youngblood plays the husband and father, Jaguar Paw, a forest-dwelling and self-sustaining tribal Mayan who, along with his brethren, is taken captive by urban Mayans, who plan to use the captives as slaves and human sacrifices. These details have the desired visceral effect on the viewer, and when combined with Gibson's command of the film's basic story of a husband and father's heroic journey to rescue his family, Apocalypto becomes an absorbing drama. Apocalypto, which emphasizes the barbarity of late Mayan culture at the expense of its accomplishments in the sciences, written language, and city-building, is rife with assaults on the body – be they the tearing out of a living heart from a human sacrifice or the image of an animal impaled on the many sharp prongs of a hunter's trap. Whereas 2,000 years of Christian-era storytelling had prepared us for the ferocity of the injuries inflicted on Jesus Christ, we were not prepared for Gibson's near-pornographic obsession with the fleshy details of their depiction. Only now, after the graphic displays of extreme physical torture in Apocalypto and The Passion of the Christ, can we really notice Gibson's fixation on the scarification of the flesh in his two earlier films, Braveheart and The Man Without a Face. This is the theme that forms the consistent thread in his work and will prove more revealing than any scrutiny for sexism, Jew-baiting, and whatnot. With his fourth feature film as a director, Mel Gibson continues his (probably unintentional) study of the mortification of the flesh through the ages. The films Gibson has directed demonstrate an increasingly deft understanding of epic scope, narrative mechanics, and visceral response. One conclusion, however, is undeniable: He's a powerfully effective filmmaker. Think and say what you will about the beliefs and actions of Mel Gibson.
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