Jaguar paw apocalypto
![jaguar paw apocalypto jaguar paw apocalypto](https://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/21700000/Apocalypto-apocalypto-21708199-321-500.jpg)
Or the yada, yada, yada, we don't have all day. Or the bit where a man is tricked into eating raw tapir gonads.
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It's an adventure movie of the old school, excepting that the old school didn't have such access to such realistic gore effects.īraveheart, The Passion and this: Mel Gibson sure does love his movies about the human body being subjected to the most grotesque indignities ( Apocalypto falls between those two on the eI'm not a moral scold, and I'd rather see bloody, consequence-filled violence than sanitized PG-13 violence but I'm not certain that the story Gibson wished to tell absolutely required the scene of a jaguar eating a man's face, or the repeated imagery of hearts being pulled out of human and non-human bodies. There's the pullquote, if anyone wants it. Gibson, whatever his countless personal flaws, is a great filmmaker (in honesty: it wouldn't be so necessary to hate The Passion of the Christ if it weren't a masterpiece of craftsmanship), and Apocalypto is thrilling from top to bottom. There's not much plot to speak of, just a basic escape narrative, and it is taut: the film runs over two hours, but I could hardly believe I'd sat for half of that when it was all done. So, 500 words on what the film isn't how about I discuss what the film is? It's a rollicking action movie, no more and no less.
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And I know it doesn't, because 24 hours ago I was trying to figure out how to grapple with Apocalypto, when a friend all but asked me: didn't I want it to be racist? And I did, and it's not, and that's enough digital ink spilled over that topic. Now, I can certainly see that this might have been a different film once upon a time before a certain night of drinking, but I didn't see that cut: I saw this cut, and this cut simply doesn't ring any of my racist alarms. (I really just hate the Spaniards because they mess up my Braveheart model: if the forest tribe is the Scots and the Mayans are the English, the Spanish are like, William Wallace's dead wife in the torture scene. As to whether the Mayans "deserve" it, the epigram notwithstanding, there's no reason to view them as anything other than cartoon baddies opposed to Our Hero. slaughter everyone and kill the survivors with smallpox. It's not "racist" insofar as we have no reason to assume that the white people aren't going to e.g. But this hero, who (again) has never been shown to be wrong in any way, responds to the Spanish by running away with his family. Skip this paragraph if you're one of those spoiler-averse types: to be fair, the movie ends with a deus ex machina wherein the arrival of the Spanish saves our plucky hero from near certain death. This is a very conservative film (that's not fair: it's reactionary in the black helicopters sense), but not because it is invested in the inferiority of non-whites. The main character, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), is never presented as incapable or idiotic or anything less than upright and praisworthy. It wasn't racist when it was white-on-white, and it's disingenuous to say that it should be any different for Mayan-on-forest tribe. Really, it's pretty much a do-over of Braveheart: a noble country-dweller just trying to live his life is savaged by the Ee-vil Urbanites, and he revenges himself upon them in needlessly bloody ways.
![jaguar paw apocalypto jaguar paw apocalypto](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/17/b4/10/17b410a3ec61ee6168b9f787369321b0.jpg)
It's about two tribes, the city people and the jungle people, and how the city people burn the jungle people's village, rape the women, and sacrifice the men to sky gods. That's really not the film's game at all. The first bit of myth: the ad campaign, and even the opening of the film, with the portentous Will Durant epigram, "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," seem to suggest that this film is all about how those horrible pre-Christians were too busy slaughtering each other to notice the Spanish arrive, and thank God that White Men saved them from themselves.
![jaguar paw apocalypto jaguar paw apocalypto](https://www.filmarena-eng.com/obrazky/test_7879_8.jpg)
It's just an action movie, and a fairly solid one at that. While far - very far - from being a masterpiece, Apocalypto is not a raving heap of anti-pagan crazy. An anti-Semitic homophobe making a film about how the Mayans got what was coming to them? A splendid time is guaranteed for all! Providing that they all love schadenfreude. I'm not going to lie: for all my honest arguments in favor of Mel Gibson's skill as a craftsman, my actual reason for seeing Apocalypto was because I wanted to bask in the crazy.