Fantastic Fest Report: Apocalypto Now

Also on the good side of the ledger, Gibson wisely used non-professionals and drew good performances out of nearly all of them. The action scenes are properly pulse-pounding, even before final editing. A number of scenes are incredibly effective, especially in the devastation of the forest people's village, the sad goodbye of the children, and the sickening dread of those waiting to be executed.

The bad: In the post-screening Q & A, Gibson made it clear that he intended to draw parallels between the Mayan Civilization and our modern-day civilization. Obviously, I agree that history teaches valuable lessons (as in Santayana, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it"). Who doesn't? But here, the viewer is left to supply all the context and draw all the conclusions.

Gibson said he intentionally made the characters archetypical to allow the audience to more easily connect with an ancient civilization (and also because it's a foreign-language film with no stars). He buttresses the establishing scenes with plenty of bawdy humor and some risible lines of dialogue (most memorably to me is when a tree nearly falls on the captive forest people as they are being led to their doom, and the brutal tribe's chief says with a smile, "I am walking here," as though he were an ancestor of Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy).

He also makes the peaceful forest tribe entirely good and the brutual "civilized" tribe entirely evil. The balance of the story is spent detailing the brutalities and basic inhumanity of the "civilized" tribe and the sweet nature of the resourceful forest people. There's such a contrast, a bald desire to pit good vs. evil, that it simplifies the downfall of a civilization rather than provide much enlightenment.

* Spoiler Warning *

Much of the third act consists of a lengthy chase sequence as our forest people hero, having miraculously escaped execution, races home to escape death and return to his wife and child, who he managed to hide away from the brutal people. The sequence is well-staged, yet it's here that the "just when you think it's bad, it gets worse" structure becomes somewhat exhausting. Maybe this will benefit from a slimmed-down middle section -- which Gibson said needed trimming -- which will get the viewer to the chase scenes quicker and perhaps less tired of all the brutality (not that I'm saying the brutality is not authentic).

The ugly: This could get hammered Stateside even while it makes a ton of money overseas. That's more of a marketing and financial issue, in which I have much less interest, but I expect a very divisive reaction, simply because of who Gibson is and how he and Touchstone will be trying to market the picture.

My conclusion: Taken as an action-adventure flick, it provides a different angle to a familiar story. I was never tempted to doze off. Trying to make it more "important" that that will be a tough sell for many audiences.