The greatest mystery surrounding the Mayan civilization is why it collapsed so suddenly. With his surviving fellow villagers, Jaguar Paw is bound and marched off through the jungle, but not before he’s secreted his very pregnant wife Seven (Dalia Hernandez) and little son (Carlos Emilio Baez) in a deep pit, promising, rather against the odds, to return. Both of these heavies could stay in costume and stride straight into another “Mad Max” film. Two members of what the press notes identify as Holcane warriors stand out: the leader, Zero Wolf (the supremely imposing Raoul Trujillo), whose left arm and head are festooned with human and animal jaws, and the sadistic Snake Ink (Rodolfo Palacios, fantastically hateful), who, restrained from killing Jaguar Paw by Zero Wolf, instead murders the captive’s father in front of him, launching an antagonism that runs through the picture.
These guys are more heavily decorated than the locals, with bones through their noses and elsewhere. Paradise comes to an abrupt end a half-hour in with the dawn attack of marauders who pillage with ruthless expertise. His teeth are not quite as bad as those of his pals, which are very bad indeed. Chief among them is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), an athletic young man who has long flowing locks, sports tattoos, designed body scars, large ear adornments and a sort of chin plug, and wears nothing but a well-fitted loin cloth. It establishes the relaxed, intimate, sensual nature of family-oriented life in a small jungle settlement occupied by the fearsome-looking but free-spirited protags. Starting at a run and seldom stopping for a breather, pic opens on an animal hunt that occasions a graphically gross two-prong practical joke that instantly humanizes the characters. With co-screenwriter Farhad Safinia, Gibson has cooked up a scenario that is fundamentally a survival and chase film, with a final act that trades on the human hunt motif of “The Most Dangerous Game” and Cornel Wilde’s “The Naked Prey.”īut both the grand conception of a civilization in decline and the extraordinary detail with which the society is presented make the picture much more than that, to the extent that it startlingly echoes another portent-laden year-end release, Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men ” one film is set in the past, the other in the near-future, one was made in Mexico by a Yank-Aussie, the other in Britain by a Mexican, but both are contemporaneously resonant stories of pursuit through poisoned, dangerous lands on the brink. Despite the subject’s inherent spectacle, conflict and societal interest, Central America’s pre-Columbian history has scarcely been touched by filmmakers Hollywood’s only venture into the territory was the little-remembered 1963 quasi-epic “Kings of the Sun,” with Yul Brynner and George Chakiris.Ĭast largely with indigenous nonpros speaking the prevailing surviving dialect of the Mesoamericans, “Apocalypto” is exotic, wild, ferocious, teeming with startling incident and brutal violence.
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