Apocalypto

No one goes for the jugular quite like Mad Mel. I doubt there is another filmmaker in Hollywood who could have made a movie about the ancient Mayan civilization in the Yucatec language, with no stars, and then having got the greenlight (owning your own studio has its perks) proceeded to trample that civilization under foot, metaphorically speaking.

A bloodbath virtually from start to finish, Gibson's 'Apocalypse Then' is not exactly Dances with Wolves in the pc department, although he does lace this historical hatchet job with portents of environmental catastrophe that are supposed to chime with contemporary fears. It even begins with a weighty quotation from the American popular historian William Durant: 'A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.'

There may be some truth in that, but (save for one haunting sequence of pre-industrial urban blight) it's not a proposition this movie will devote more than an afterthought to. What the great Mayan civilization boils down to here is a marauding war party intent on securing fresh blood for what appears to be a permanent sacrificial orgy to placate the Gods (never has the phrase 'Heads will roll' been so appropriate).

As in his previous blockbuster exploitation flicks, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Gibson masochistically g(l)orifies the role of the martyr. In this case his glutton for punishment is a young tribesman called Jaguar Paw, played by newcomer Rudy Youngblood.

Over the course of two or three days, poor J-Paw will wake to find his village overrun by men with even uglier facial jewelry than his own. He will be beaten and bound, and see his father's throat cut for his captors' vicious amusement. Then he will be marched through the forest along with the other men from his tribe, brought to a terrifying city where he will be daubed in blue pigment, dragged to the top of a ziggurat, and laid down on a sacrificial altar where the high priest will prepare to pluck out his heart and slice off his head. It's at this point that the Heavens will intervene, and Jaguar Paw is spared death to endure further trials - namely an hour-long chase sequence that constitutes the film's second half.

It's at this point that Gibson's ambition finally becomes clear: he couldn't give two figs for the fate of civilizations, the Mayans or indeed our own. His focus is fixed on crafting an elemental action movie, one man alone against a pack of armed hunters, running through the jungle with wild beasts and waterfalls to keep him on his toes. It's Rambo gone native, and on that limited level, Apocalypto is actually pretty impressive, maybe the best action film we've seen recently.

Admittedly, such a judgment requires accepting that a man who has been systematically beaten, abused, and shot through with an arrow could still outrun a jaguar� Personally, I didn't believe it, but I accepted it anyway. There's a pig-headed obstinacy about the movie's compulsion to compel that batters you into submission. And takes your wife and child hostage as an insurance policy. Look up Emotional overkill in the dictionary, it will point you to this movie.

Is it Art? Hardly. Though Dean Semler's astonishing digital photography suggests the sky's the limit for the new technology. If you really want to see a meditation on cultural demise, make it Terrence Malick's poetic The New World. On the other hand if you want to savour our own civilization's frequently grotesque and sadistic decadence, well, Mel's your man.

Tom Charity
Tom.charity@lovefilm.com