Apocalypto

[hedwig]

What is the guy on the far right thinking?

"Pastrami? Again?"

didn't want that to get left in the dust.

2006, you better not dissapoint!

don't worry, it (INLANDEMPIRETHEFOUNTAINASCANNDERDARKLYVFORVENDETTA) won't.

[Kal]

Im not sure about the last one you mentioned...

Anyways... this does look nice visually... but no actors? all natives extras? What is this really about?

[grand theft sparrow]

Im not sure about the last one you mentioned...

Anyways... this does look nice visually... but no actors? all natives extras? What is this really about?

It's Baraka meets The Gods Must Be Crazy!

[Pubrick]

Check out this flash of Mel Gibson during the super duper fast ending:

does this seem completely bizarre to anyone else? i mean, everyone is like "oh, that's just mel posing like a madman in a subliminal frame from the teaser of his highly anticipated follow-up to the beating of christ. duh!"

[pete]

not to make Herzog my Wes Anderson of 2005, but man, how awesome would this film have been if Herzog was the director?  it's like a movie screaming for Herzog.

[MacGuffin]

Apocalypto Now
EXCLUSIVE: You'd think Mel Gibson was all done with violent movies about the past told in a foreign tongue, right? Think again
By TIM PADGETT; Time Magazine

"I need to see the blood!" shouts Mel Gibson. "Your character is going to die soon!" He picks up a bullhorn: "Attention! We are all dying here! We are all dying!" The Oscar-winning director is standing in a rock quarry near Veracruz, Mexico, shooting a hellish scene for Apocalypto, his action epic about the ancient Maya. Hundreds of local extras--many of whom have never seen a movie, let alone acted in one--are pounding fake limestone to build a temple used for human sacrifices. Gibson wants one of the extras, covered in white lime dust, to visibly cough up a glob of fake blood. But something keeps getting lost in translation. Take after take, the young man, who speaks only Spanish, politely covers his mouth as he hacks. A second candidate for the role does the same. Gibson finally lets out a tortured howl, digs vainly for a cigarette in his empty pack of Camels and turns the set into his own Thunderdome. The translator does his best to convey the passion of the Mel.

The blasts turn to laughs soon after when, to lighten the mood, Gibson has the crew bring out a stuffed jaguar and leads the extras running away in mock terror. But later he admits to TIME, which this month was given the first look at Apocalypto's production, that the utter inexperience of most of the cast is a price he's paying for the authentic feel he wants in the film, in which dialogue is spoken solely in Yucatec Maya. If people were imagining that Gibson, 50, might coast a little after his 2004 movie, The Passion of the Christ, inspired not only months of controversy but also nearly $1 billion worth of ticket sales, the director has given his answer: Nope. If anything, this film is a more ambitious project than The Passion--although success does make some things a mite easier. Gibson had to walk a via dolorosa to find a distributor for The Passion and ended up distributing it more or less himself, but Disney's Touchstone Pictures needed only to read Apocalypto's script before signing on to release it in early August.

The Passion experience--especially the part in which critics hurled anti-Semitism charges at Gibson, an ultraconservative Roman Catholic whose father has questioned whether the Holocaust happened--thickened Gibson's hide along with his wallet. So if there are complaints about Apocalypto's portrayal of human sacrifice by the Maya, whose mostly impoverished descendants today are a cause célèbre for liberals, Gibson says he won't care. "After what I experienced with The Passion, I frankly don't give a flying f___ about much of what those critics think."

Still, he likes to confound expectations--he wears a cross containing relics of martyred saints, but he can swear like a Quentin Tarantino character--and those who peg him as a reactionary may be surprised to learn that his new film sounds warnings straight out of liberal Hollywood's bible. Apocalypto, which Gibson loosely translates from the Greek as "a new beginning," was inspired in large part by his work with the Mirador Basin Project, an effort to preserve a large swath of the Guatemalan rain forest and its Maya ruins. Gibson and his rookie cowriter on Apocalypto, Farhad Safinia, were captivated by the ancient Maya, one of the hemisphere's first great civilizations, which reached its zenith about A.D. 600 in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. The two began poring over Maya myths of creation and destruction, including the Popol Vuh, and research suggesting that ecological abuse and war-mongering were major contributors to the Maya's sudden collapse, some 500 years before Europeans arrived in the Americas.

Those apocalyptic strains haunt Apocalypto, which takes place in an opulent but decaying Maya kingdom, whose leaders insist that if the gods are not appeased by more temples and human sacrifices, the crops will die. But the writers hope that the larger themes of decline will be a wake-up call. "The parallels between the environmental imbalance and corruption of values that doomed the Maya and what's happening to our own civilization are eerie," says Safinia. Gibson, who insists ideology matters less to him than stories of "penitential hardship" like his Oscar-winning Braveheart, puts it more bluntly: "The fearmongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys."

But the project also fulfills Gibson's need for speed. The hunk who played Mad Max 27 years ago wants to "shake up the stale action-adventure genre," which he feels has been taken hostage by computer-generated imagery (CGI), stock stories and shallow characters. To rattle the cage, he says, "we had to think of something utterly different." The Mad Maya hero in Apocalypto is Jaguar Paw. His escape through the Mexican rain forest will "feel like a car chase that just keeps turning the screws," says Gibson, flashing one of his patented bug-eyed expressions. True to the no-pain, no-gain credo of his other films, Apocalypto seeks to deliver enough pre-Columbian punishment--like the decidedly non-CGI mauling of a character by an animal--to rival the medieval gore of Braveheart. "I get pretty banged up in some pretty awful ways," says film newcomer Rudy Youngblood, 25, the Comanche and Cree Indian from Texas who plays Jaguar Paw.

Gibson is betting the chase will feel even hairier thanks to a new digital camera system, Panavision's Genesis, that yields a "tremendous sensation of velocity," says cinematographer Dean Semler, who won an Oscar for Dances with Wolves. All the doom and zoom sound fun, but the ancient Maya are also called the Greeks of the New World--they invented the concept of zero, built astonishing cities and used a more complex calendar than ours. Gibson insists the glory gets its close-ups too. Says Richard Hansen, a Maya scholar at Idaho State University, head of the Mirador Basin Project and a consultant for Apocalypto: "This is by far the best treatment--the first treatment really--of the Maya any film has ever done. I'm amazed at the detail Mel's shooting for."

In fact, says veteran production designer Tom Sanders, Apocalypto "is the hardest show I've ever worked on." Stacks of archaeology books and magazines are strewn about a massive warehouse in Veracruz, where an army of costume and makeup artisans from Mexico and Italy are painstakingly re-creating feathers of the nearly extinct quetzal for royal headdresses and long, looping earlobe extensions for warriors. (Because those prostheses are difficult to apply, the actors must wear them for days on end, which rather spooks fellow guests at the Fiesta Americana Hotel.) This month Gibson starts filming at a sprawling and meticulously appointed city of Maya pyramids and markets that Sanders' crew spent six months building outside Veracruz. It all suggests a Titanic-size budget, but Gibson will say only that his production company, Icon, is spending less than $50 million. (The Passion cost $30 million.)

Given that controversy hit his last film months before it even finished production, Gibson has been careful to build Mesoamerican goodwill for Apocalypto: two-thirds of the cast and crew are Mexican, and Gibson has donated $1 million to communities in Veracruz state affected by Hurricane Stan last year. Mexican cast members like Mayra Sérbulo, 30, a Zapotec Indian who plays a villager, say they expect some criticism of the film from Mexican nationalists (who also tore into Salma Hayek's Frida), especially since it touches on the raw issue of human sacrifice, which scholars don't believe was a prevalent Maya practice until the post-classic period, after A.D. 900, when fiercer influences like the Toltecs and Aztecs arrived. It is in that period, not coincidentally, that Apocalypto is set. "But I'm frankly surprised and excited that someone is making a film about an indigenous Mexican culture that most Mexicans don't even know all that well," says Sérbulo. "I feel valued by this movie."

Gibson nonetheless is a lightning rod--pro-Mel and anti-Mel blogs abound on the Internet--and he knows that even non-Mexican detractors will ask why, if he's so morbidly fascinated with the bloody deeds of Jewish Pharisees and Maya priests, he doesn't hold a mirror to his own church and film the Spanish Inquisition. Gibson won't say that's a future plan, but he nods and agrees that "there are monsters in every culture."

The more immediate question is whether Apocalypto can repeat The Passion's success. After all, devout Christians willing to sit through Latin and Aramaic dialogue to see Christ crucified vastly outnumber Maya scholars. Gibson seems certain that the film's "kinetic energy" will make Maya language and culture "cool" enough to attract a crowd. Maya prophecy says the current world, which began 5,000 years ago, will end in 2012. So, even if Apocalypto flops, Gibson will at least have given the Maya one last chance to get the word out.

[The Red Vine]

any respect I had left for Gibson is gone. what a douche.

[Gamblour.]

um what? how? he seems absolutely crazed and impassioned, and he's not siding with any one ideology. what's your problem?

[Pubrick]

any respect I had left for Gibson is gone. what a douche.

are you gonna back that up with a reason or what? talk about a douche..

he's the fucking man as far as i'm concerned. i think everyone is watching him from a distance with a raised eyebrow, like "that wacky mel". most ppl, if they care at all, fail to realise the precision with which he's calculating his career right now. or maybe it's completely obvious but either way it's exciting. i'd rather successful actor/directors use their clout to redefine the boundaries of what is deemed commercially acceptable, than make another Zathura or sumthing.

if this movie achieves maximum awesomeness it may generate interest in other sorts of historically-aware productions, making The New World not so much a blip on the collective radar but a precursor to this golden age of historical revival, to be continued with Apocalypto, The Fountain, The Golden Age, etc. that's damn respectable to me.

to summarize:

any respect I had left for Gibson is gone. what a douche.

flashing one of his patented bug-eyed expressions.

[The Red Vine]

the problem with Gibson is that.....well, he's full of shit. phony from top to bottom. ever since "Braveheart" he seems to be very aware of his audience and how much money he can bring in. it seems to be the only reason he keeps making them. "The Passion" was total exploitation (hardly a movie) and it made millions upon millions. and he thinks he can attract a crowd with this next movie cuz the foreign language "sounds really cool".

he's not the worst filmmaker out there, far from it. but I don't care for him or his movies.

[©brad]

the problem with Gibson is that.....well, he's full of shit. phony from top to bottom. ever since "Braveheart" he seems to be very aware of his audience and how much money he can bring in. it seems to be the only reason he keeps making them. "The Passion" was total exploitation (hardly a movie) and it made millions upon millions. and he thinks he can attract a crowd with this next movie cuz the foreign language "sounds really cool".

he's not the worst filmmaker out there, far from it. but I don't care for him or his movies.

so you hate him b/c

1. his films make money
2. he's aware of his audience
3. he makes foreign films b/c they sound cool

riiiiiiight.

[The Red Vine]

exactly.............wait, what?

[Gamblour.]

bottom line: your argument is shit. think of a better one.

[The Red Vine]

first off, I don't hate Gibson. he's not the first guy to make movies for the simple reason of making millions of dollars. but that's what he does. and that's why I don't have a lot of respect for him. perhaps I didn't spell that out enough in my previous posts.

but I gotta hand it to him - he's great at marketing. but I have yet to see a decent movie from him.

[Sunrise]

Redvines, I can respect that you don't like The Passion, but to say that he made that film for the simple reason of making a million dollars seems like a stretch. The guy put up all of his own money, made it with relative unknowns (Caviezel wasn't exactly a household name at the time), used a foreign language that isn't used anymore, and went through distributing hell to get it to the public. Those are risks that are not usually commensurate with simply wanting to rake in the dough. Also, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt from the standpoint of his religious beliefs. I could never make a judgment about them, but if someone is a Christian and they make a film about the passion, nothing could be more personal. If he did do it just to make money, the guy is scum. I happen to think otherwise.

As far as Apocalypto...the jury is obviously still out. He seems to be using a lot of same formulas, but he is much more sure of himself. That might not be a good thing, though.