The local cable TV companies have been showing the 2006 movie “Apocalypto” by superstar actor, sometime director Mel Gibson. The movie is equal parts revolting and intriguing. The movie is concerned with the vicious decline of the once brilliant Maya civilization, about the time the conquistadors invaded the “New World”. 

Mel Gibson filmed Apocalypto primarily in the Mexican state of Veracruz in Catemaco, San Andres Tuxtla, and Paso de Ovejas. The language spokspoken is Yucatec Maya, not English, Spanish or French. Similarly Gibson employed an arcane language device in his popular though unrelentingly gory Biblical epic “The Passion of Christ” (2004) in which the actors spoke Aramaic and Latin. Gibson explained the purpose of employing recondite foreign languages was that it created an “emphasis on the cinematic visuals”. Some heavy duty, artsy-fartsy rhetoric spewing forth, Mel dude.

  Mel Gibson directing the movie

One of the selling points for the movie was the so-called obsession Gibson had with historical detail. The guy was said to have done his homework – and then some. Which brings up one really weird contradiction: if Gibson is such a stickler for precise detail, for historical accuracy, why oh why didn’t he cast Mayas in the lead roles. He cast tall, lanky North American Indians, Canadian Indians and Mexican Mestizos in the leads. The hero of the film is Jaguar Paw played by Rudy Youngblood, is a Comanche and Cree mixture who hails from Texas, USA. His wife is played by the young Mexican dancer, Dalia Hernández Armenta, whose features and pigmentation are much closer to East Indian than Mayan. Why oh why didn’t he cast Mayas in the lead roles? None of the leads even vaguely resemble Mayas like Valentino Shal, Greg Chuc or Rigoberta Menchu.

That dis-connect is a flagrant misstep for a director that brags about, flaunts his “accuracy”. It’s the kind of misstep that could infer a subtext of racism. Racism similar to that offensive stuff found in all those old Johnny Weissmuller, Tarzan movies from the thirties in which the African natives were played by Los Angelino Caucasians and Hispanics in black-face. Vulgar, idiotic stereotyping and totally indefensible. 

  North American Indians, Canadian Indians and Mexican Mestizos used in a movie of the Maya

The second irritant in  Apocalypto is its over zealous, fanatical content. Gibson is an outspoken Traditionalist Catholic who uses movies to proselytize his personal belief systems. Gibson follows the Roman Catholic belief,  Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, which is Latin, meaning: "Outside the Church there is no salvation.” In Apocalypto Gibson paints the “heathen” Maya as a bunch of cruel, blood-thirty savages. In his movie the principal form of entertainment for the Maya masses is watching the ruler-priests cut the hearts out of live captives, cutting their heads off and throwing them down the temple stairs. Offensive content goes head to head with muscular cinematic pizzazz.

Gibson is a superbly facile director who has an impressive knack with visualizing action sequences. The 45 minute plus chase scene in Apocalypto is topnotch moviemaking and then some. But being a virtuoso technician doesn’t always equal good movies. There’s more to movies than entertainment.

The sane contradictory dilemma which mitigates Triumph of the Will (1934) by the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. That film too, is an example of excellent propaganda filmmaking; though the content glorifying Adolph Hitler is a bitter pill to swallow. Another brilliant though obscene film is D.W. Grifffith’s 1915 epic “The Birth of a Nation” (also known as The Clansman). It is arguably the most influential and controversial movie ever made. The technically sophisticated adventure movie is actually a cleverly disguised promotion of white supremacism and glorified the Ku Klux Klan. Sick content presented with cinematic wizardry. Gibson’s Apocalypto plows the same insidious fields of racism and violence as Griffith’s “Nation”. Both display talent corrupted by fanaticism. Beware, there’s more to movies than entertainment. Beware.