Apocalypto

[swan_tower]

Grar.

So very nearly good. I can forgive it things like architectural features apparently drawn from about 1500 years of Mayan history. I can, if I try very hard, dig up a Mayan city still occupied around, y'know, that time. (Though they could have made my life far simpler in that respect by filming in Nahuatl instead of Yucatec. Then I wouldn't have spent five minutes after the credits snarling and flailing about Aztecs.) I could maybe even let go of the weirdness of a large Mayan city apparently being surrounded by hunter-gatherers at no more than two days' distance. (What, did they all survive off that one cornfield?) And hey, some of the things I thought were inaccuracies turned out not to be!

But grar.

I debated long and hard whether or not I wanted to see this movie, given Mel Gibson's personal disagreeability to me, given the potential (and, I'm afraid, actual) colonialist overtones of the story. In the end I went because I'm a Mesoamerican geek, and because I wanted to tell Hollywood there's at least one more person in the world who will happily watch movies in obscure Central American languages with actors nobody's ever heard of. And I don't regret going, and I really almost like the movie. But it isn't what you'd call the best representation of Mayan culture; the aforementioned hunter-gatherers make it look more primitive than it needed to, and it doesn't give the context that human sacrifice needs. (Okay, so my article is Nonfiction Lite, but it sums up much of what I would otherwise have to repeat here.) Few people watching that movie will know or care about the cosmological framework in which sacrifice generally fit, nor the ways in which the epidemics that appear to have preceded the physical arrival of Europeans on the mainland sent people into a frenzy that was to normal behavior as the apocalyptic cults and flagellant societies of plague-era Europe were to normal Christianity before everybody started dying. Few people will think to make that comparison to our own history, and therefore to understand how Europeans wouldn't come off so well were we to make this kind of movie about them during the Black Death. Instead, we get Noble Savages (the hunter-gatherers, whom I actually quite liked aside from their anachronistic subsistence strategy) fleeing the pointless sadism of the Evil City Folk. Things lack context, and sometimes sport inaccuracies while doing so. It isn't a great combination.

And yet. And yet. The cenote outside the village, the jade in the nobles' teeth, the atlatl. The murals with elements taken from a site my sophomore tutorial leader excavated. The actor whose profile is about the closest you can get to Mayan without practicing cranial modification on an infant and then waiting twenty years for him to grow up. There were so many details that were good, and Gibson filmed the movie in freakin' Yucatec. It came so close to being a film that would make me melt in geeky glee. I just wish I didn't have to feel so ambivalent about it.

Comments

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the review!!! I plan to see it. I wondered how authentic it might be but hey, I fully support movies being made that aren't about a bunch of young white people so off I go. Cool about your teacher too!! My best friend has done lots of her work in Central America. Hmmm.... I bet you two would really like each other. She'll be here for Xmas break.....

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

The problems is that, in this case, inauthenticity = brown people looking like bloodthirsty savages. But it would be hard to accurately show pre-contact Mesoamerica without it looking that way, because your average person is going to have a knee-jerk reaction to human sacrifice regardless.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can totally understand what you are writing. I have similar reactions when people talk about the Celts and human sacrifice. It bugs me as sometimes it is said in context of "gee aren't Christians better."