Apocalypto.

"Any cinephile will want to see Apocalypto, because it boasts bravura filmmaking," writes Anne Thompson. "The message seems to be: don't mess with Mother Nature, or she will kick your ass."

"Mel Gibson is sick, but his new film profits from his weakness," writes Slant's Ed Gonzalez. "Gibson sees the fall of the Mayan empire as a big action-movie thrill ride, replete with a jaguar pursuit that subs for a high-octane car chase and a vicious animal attack that could have been swiped from Jurassic Park.... Fanboys will lap it up, but what about the rest of the world?"

Variety's Todd McCarthy: "Mel Gibson is always good for a surprise, and his latest is that Apocalypto is a remarkable film."

Oh, it's remarkable alright, Nick Davis might counter. He grades it an "F." A couple of "F"s, actually.

Updated through 12/10.

Jeffrey Wells: "Mel Gibson has a thing - a big thing - about brutality."

Brevity the Enemy sets off a discussion at Reverse Shot.

Sheigh Crabtree has a making-of piece in the Los Angeles Times.

And, as you may have heard, Allison Hope Weiner has had a long talk with Gibson for Entertainment Weekly.

Updates, 12/4: Newsweek's David Ansen: "Once again he returns to his favorite theme: nearly naked men being tortured. Repeatedly. Imaginatively. At great length.... The harder Apocalypto works to shock and excite you, the less shocked and excited you become, until you may find yourself beset by the urge to giggle."

Nick Schager: "Apocalypto's sociological portrait of its extinct culture has been lavishly conceived by Gibson, which never matches The New World's aura of poetic authenticity but nonetheless has a lived-in realism that - by lacking any measure of exploitative exoticism - remains both alluring and convincing regardless of how many liberties may have been taken with regards to historical accuracy."

Daniel Eagan: "If you've ever seen a jungle movie, you will be prepared for the poisonous snake, the pit of quicksand, the barbed booby trap, the man-eating cat, the deadly waterfall, etc. They appear like clockwork here, but with such heart-stopping beauty and unexpected humor, it's as if they are being shown for the first time.... Whatever your feelings about him as a person, credit Gibson for bringing an incredibly difficult project to the screen, and not only making it work, but on such a majestic scale."

Updates, 12/5: Sharon Waxman in the New York Times: "The rising tide of generally positive, if qualified, reviews poses a problem for Hollywood insiders, many of whom would prefer to ignore Mr Gibson entirely, despite his formal apology and a trip to rehab."

Variety asks Hollywood, "Given positive reviews, should voters honor Apocalypto with Oscar noms?"

"[I]t is clear that something more than sadism stirs the director's soul," writes Time's Richard Schickel. "Gibson loves operating in that historical territory where the record is sketchy and subject to mythic reinvention, which leaves him - and anyone else - free to fill in the blanks with whatever dubious ideological instruction he likes.... Gibson is a primitive all right, but so were Cecil B DeMille and DW Griffith, and somehow we survived their idiocies. Doubtless there will come a day when he joins them in the Valhalla of the vacuous. One or two more Apocalyptos ought to do the trick."

"Apocalypto is unburdened by nationalist or religious piety - it's pure, amoral sensationalism," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The spectacle of a village torched and its peaceful inhabitants rounded up and marched to a remote industrial complex run by slave labor under the heel of gratuitously cruel, fetish-bedecked warriors, there to be systematically mass murdered on the altar of some irrational ideology does suggest Poland circa 1944. There's no denying this holocaust - complete with vast corpse-disposal pit - or is there?"

Updates, 12/6: David Thomson, blogging for the Guardian: "Mel Gibson has always had one sterling Australian attitude and he knows that most of what goes down in Hollywood is humbug or an act. Plus, in a rather blood-thirsty way, he's a pretty good filmmaker and a cunning bastard."

"As a student of Maya culture for decades, no two movies came more highly anticipated for me this year than Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain and Mel Gibson's Apocalypto," writes Michael Guillén. "I've talked to Aronofsky about the former and really have no interest in talking to Gibson about the latter, which - for its moments of visual genius - is sullied by a complete lack of restraint when it comes to depictions of violence and its appropriation of historical material for dramatic effect, without respect for chronology or the breadth of Mayan sensibility."

"Unpleasant, pointless, gruesome, and exploitative, Apocalypto is the worst movie of the year," announces Jürgen Fauth.

Updates, 12/7: Susan King reports in the Los Angeles Times on the production design.

Scott Foundas in the LA Weekly: "By the time you are reading this, those who insist upon turning Mel Gibson into a divisive political issue on the order of abortion and handgun control will have alternately condemned Apocalypto as an orgy of sadism and celebrated it as a profoundly spiritual experience. For those of us who prefer to judge Gibson solely in terms of his art, the movie is a virtuosic piece of action cinema... And while there has been no shortage of recent films that decry the horrors of war and man's inhumanity to his fellow man, I know of none other quite this sickeningly powerful."

Godfrey Cheshire, writing in the Independent Weekly, finds it "a full-throated popcorn epic, a brilliantly executed tale of survival and endurance so primal in its appeal, and so effective in its orchestration of narrative surprise, that it can be enjoyed by audiences of virtually any age or cultural background—except, no doubt, for the very squeamish."

Armond White in the New York Press: "Serious moviegoers will once again recognize the intense visual imagination and dedication that Gibson brings to film directing.... Only viciously, politically-biased, anti-art pundits can deny that lately, with [The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto], Gibson has been thinking in visual terms and putting most American movie directors to shame."

Cindy Fuchs in the Philadelphia City Paper: "Dragged from his tranquil, leafy-wet village to a desiccated, rotting hull of a kingdom, Jaguar Paw's remarkably athletic determination carries him and his assailants back around to the village. In a less lunk-headed movie, such looping might be thematically on point, but here it just emphasizes that the plot leads exactly where you know it will."

Cinematical's James Rocchi: "[F]from Braveheart on, Gibson's directorial efforts have been fairly blood-soaked historical exercises - and Apocalyto isn't just more of the same, it's entirely too much of the same."

Mayan groups are not happy, reports the BBC.

Updates, 12/8: "The brutality in Apocalypto is so relentless and extreme that it sometimes moves beyond horror into a kind of grotesque comedy, but to dismiss it as excessive or gratuitous would be to underestimate Mr. Gibson's seriousness," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Which is not to say that Apocalypto is a great film, or even that it can be taken quite as seriously as it wants to be."

Paul Fischer interviews Gibson for the Guardian.

Andrew O'Hehir's take on such seriousness in Salon: "If only this were a cheeseball entertainment out of 1963, where the opening-night audience might be showered with Styrofoam temple blocks and soap-bubble lava, while actors in fearsome Maya regalia bearing plastic severed heads on spears roamed the aisles." Ok, more seriously: "I have two things to tell you: Mel Gibson has serious issues with violence and masculinity, and if there's really 'Oscar buzz' around this picture, then everyone in Hollywood really is an idiot."

Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "Numerous good things can be said about Apocalypto, [Gibson's] foray into the decaying Mayan civilization of the early 1500s, but every last one of them is overshadowed by Gibson's well-established penchant for depictions of stupendous amounts of violence." Also, noting that both Gibson and Clint Eastwood launched their careers as tough guys in action flicks, Turan takes this and runs with it: "[N]ot only do the directors take opposite approaches to the act of putting violence on screen, they increasingly differ in their point of view on the subject."

"Basically Apocalypto is 20 minutes of Everyday Life in a Mayan Village; 10 minutes brutal battle; 25 minutes of Slave Trek; 25 minutes of even more brutal Life in a Mayan City; 45 minutes of 16th-century Naked Prey," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "The whole thing is absorbing, first as a glimpse into a lost culture, then as a traditional Good Guy Hunted by Bad Guys film."

Michelle George for the Reeler: "The idea seems to be that we are bad by default, goodness is the extreme exception; other cultures, especially, are hotbeds of badness, as is the past, and exploring either or both of them is only useful insofar as it provides a cheap, false-fronted allegory for the present."

Slate's Dana Stevens: "You don't leave Apocalypto thinking of the decline of civilizations or the power of myth or anything much except, wow, that is one sick son of a bitch."

Updates, 12/9: Dave Kehr: "The picture looks and plays a lot like Ruggero Deodato's notorious Eurotrash feature of 1980, Cannibal Holocaust - a gore fest about a television crew in pursuit of flesh eating natives in the Amazon jungle - except that Gibson has much more expensive effects technology available to him; when his extras get their heads chopped off, the hearts torn out, or their faces ripped off, the moments have a sick-making realism that makes Deodato's film look quaint and comparatively innocent."

For the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, Apocalypto "seems like something made by a crazy person. It's unrelenting, a succession of blood-soaked disaster, an artfully designed parade of cruelty that would make the Marquis de Sade get up and say, 'Enough already.'"

Jeffrey Overstreet rounds up several more reviews.

Online viewing tip. David Poland most unusual review.

Updates, 12/10: John Rogers: "It's not a masterpiece but a masterwork. A must-see on the big screen, and the script's got some subtleties in it, a narrative simple, yet rich... just go. It may not be the best movie of the year, but it's the greatest if that makes any sense." A joke follows.

Nikki Finke caught SNL's spoof.

Posted by dwhudson at December 3, 2006 2:16 PM