Apocalypto (film)
Apocalypto is an Academy Award nominated 2006 epic film directed by Mel Gibson. Set in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, it depicts one man's experience during the decline of the ancient Maya civilization.
Cast
Rudy Youngblood
- Jaguar Paw
Dalia Hernández - Seven
Jonathan
Brewer - Blunted
Morris Birdyellowhead - Flint Sky
Carlos Emilio Báez
- Turtles Run
Amilcar Ramírez - Curl Nose
Israel Contreras -
Smoke Frog
Israel Ríos - Cocoa Leaf
María Isabel Díaz
- Mother in Law (as Isabel Diaz)
Espiridion Acosta Cache - Old Story Teller
Mayra Serbulo - Young Woman
Iazua Larios - Sky Flower
Lorena Heranandez
- Village Girl
Itandehui Gutierrez - Wife
Sayuri Gutierrez - Eldest
Daughter
Hiram Soto - Fish Hunter
José Suárez - First
Temple Sacrifice
Raoul Trujillo - Zero Wolf
Gerardo
Taracena - Middle Eye
Rodolfo Palacios - Snake Ink
Ariel Galvan - Hanging Moss
Bernardo Ruiz - Drunkards Four
Ricardo Diaz
Mendoza - Cut Rock
Richard Can - Ten Peccary
Carlos Ramos - Monkey Jaw
Ammel Rodrigo Mendoza - Buzzard Hook
Marco Antonio Argueta - Speaking
Wind
Javier Escobar - Vicious Holcane
Fernando Hernandez - High Priest
Maria Isidra Hoil - Oracle Girl
Aquetzali García - Oracle Girl
Abel Woolrich - Laughing Man
Antonio Monroy - Chilam
Nicolás
Jasso - Man on Temple Top
Ronaldo Eknal - Slave Auctioneer
Miriam Tun
- Woman Auctioneer
Rafael Velez - King
Diana Botello - Queen
Joaquin
Rendon - Head Chac
Box office
Apocalypto
opened at the top of the American box office with $15 million, beating the Leonardo
DiCaprio film Blood Diamond and Nancy Meyers' The Holiday. The following weekend,
it dropped 47% to land in sixth place. It dipped another 50% over the four-day
Christmas frame and fell out of the top 10 altogether. The film grossed $51 million
in the US and an additional $69 million internationally. Icon Productions entirely
financed Apocalypto's $40 million budget, so Icon owned international rights to
the film and sold domestic distribution to Touchstone Pictures for a reduced distribution
fee.
In the United Kingdom, the film set a new record for the highest opening
weekend take by a foreign language film. It took £1.3m compared to the previous
record holder, Hero, which took £1.05m in 2004. Gibson's The Passion of
the Christ only took £229,426. The movie has also sold over $36 million
worth of DVDs in the international home video market.
Historical accuracy and
related criticism
Apocalypto has been criticized by a number of anthropologists
and archaeologists working in the field of Mayanist studies who charge that the
film depicts late Maya society as violent. The film has also been accused of historical
inaccuracy and racism by historians, Chicanos, Native Americans, and many in the
archaeological community. Some of these people charge that the film helps fuel
a stereotype that shows native Mesoamericans as bloodthirsty savages, while failing
to portray their achievements in areas such as mathematics and astronomy. Some
critics of the movie confuse the sun god Kukulkan with Gukumatz the god of K'iche'-Maya
tradition or Quetzalcoatl of Aztec mythology, however they are not the same, although
their origins are directly related. Sara Zapata Mijares, president and founder
of Federación de Clubes Yucatecos-USA, a group of Yucatec Mayans, disagrees
on any perceived negative portrayal but nonetheless commented that the film "should
have had a little bit more of the culture. It could have shown a little more why
these buildings [pyramids] were built."
Mexican reporter Juan E. Pardinas disagrees: "The bad news is that this historical interpretation bears some resemblances with reality […]. Mel Gibson's characters are more similar to the Mayas of the Bonampak's murals than the ones that appear in the Mexican school textbooks".
Likewise in the movie, another key cause of the fall of the civilization was "excessive consumption" and "environmental degradation" of which there is plenty of supporting evidence. It has been discovered that the Mayan process of creating the lime stucco cement that covered their temples required a great deal of energy to heat up the lime stone to convert it to quick lime. One calculation estimates that it would take five tons of jungle forestry to make one ton of quick lime. Dr. Hansen explains, "I found one pyramid in El Mirador that would have required nearly 650 hectares (1,600 acres) of every single available tree just to cover one building with lime stucco- Epic construction was happening- creating devastation on a huge scale" Michael D. Coe, author of "The Maya" also lists "environmental collapse" as one of the leading causes of the fall of the great empire, alongside "endemic warfare", "overpopulation", and "drought". "There is mounting evidence for massive deforestation and erosion throughout the Central Area. The Maya apocalypse, for such it was, surely had ecological roots," explains Coe.
Richard D. Hansen, the historical consultant for Apocalypto and assistant professor of archaeology at Idaho State University as well as the director of the Mirador Basin Project in Guatemala (a forest reserve home to a number of Maya archaeological sites) states that the impact the film will have on Maya archaeology will be beneficial: "It is a wonderful opportunity to focus world attention on the ancient Maya and to realize the role they played in world history."
In Hollywood on a large scale, there is an "active set of debates" between historians and filmmakers as both attempt to create meaning out of the past. Using a historical perspective to portray a work of fiction automatically thrust the work into this debate and undoubtedly will cause outcries from all types of groups. Safinia addresses such concerns by stating, "The final decision when making a film is, 'What is the right balance between historical authenticity and making it exciting visually as well?' The film is an all out entertainment thrill ride, and that is what it was always designed to do.
Mesoamerican
history
On a very basic level, Apocalypto contains a number of items unknown
in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. It depicts the latter days – the post classic
period – of Maya civilization, but the main pyramid where the human sacrifices
occurred actually comes from classic period, when the Mayas were at their zenith.
This period ended in 900 A.D., 600 years before the movie apparently takes place.
Hansen comments: "There was nothing in the post-classic period that would
match the size and majesty of that pyramid in the film. But Gibson was trying
to make a story here. He was trying to depict opulence, wealth, consumption of
resources."
The Maya city inaccurately combines details from different Maya and Mesoamerican cultures widely separated by time and place. For example, temples are in the shape of those of Tikal in the central lowlands classic style while decorated with Puuc style elements of the north west Yucatan centuries later. Co-writer and co-producer Farhad Safinia states the mixing of architectures had been done simply for aesthetic reasons.
The mural in the arched walkway includes elements from the Maya codices combined with elements from the Bonampak murals (over 700 years earlier than the film's setting) and the San Bartolo murals (some 1500 years earlier than the film's setting) – as in most civilizations, the styles of Maya art changed dramatically over the centuries. Elements of such non-Maya civilizations as those of Teotihuacan and the Aztec are also seen. Robert Carmack, an anthropology professor from SUNY Albany's renowned Mesoamerican program, said "it's a big mistake – almost a tragedy – that they present this as a Maya film." His colleague, Walter Little, agreed, stating how "a lot of people will think this is how it was, unfortunately."
Stephen Houston, professor of Anthropology at Brown University, points out that human sacrifice victims among the Maya were captured kings, members of royal families, and other high-ranking nobility: "They didn't run around rounding up ordinary people to sacrifice." However MSN Encarta mentions decapitation of royalty and heart extraction of slaves and prisoners. Karl Taube, professor of Anthropology at the University of California Riverside, objects to the huge pit filled with corpses in the film, citing the lack of evidence for mass graves. On the contrary, Hansen responds it is "conjecture", citing that "all [Gibson was] trying to do there is express the horror of it [whether those pits existed]."
Taube also objects to the large number of slaves, something for which there is also no evidence. Also, there is little possibility that the Maya would have been "dumbstruck" by the sight of a city. As agricultural people, they also would not have allowed fields of rotting corpses near their crops. Zachary Hruby, of UC Riverside, lamented the use of the Yucatec Maya language, as it gives a sense of authenticity to a film that he says has taken many unfortunate liberties with the subject. Specifically these liberties include: the style and scale of the sacrifices, the presentation of the Maya villagers as isolated people living off the wild forest, the chronological compression of the more urbanized Terminal Classic Maya and the primarily village-dwelling Late Postclassic Maya. Critics have complained that Gibson also includes the arrival of a Spanish Expedition in the last five minutes of the story and argue that the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last large Maya city was abandoned. However, despite the end of construction at many famous postclassic centers, such as Chichen Itza and Uxmal they had not been abandoned at the time of the Spanish arrival, and there were still many comparatively smaller Maya cities such as Mayapan, Tiho, Coba, Chetumal and Nito, and Tayasal, also known as Petzen Itza survived until 1697 before being conquered by the Spanish.
Some Mayanists disagree with the romantic view about the Mayas. "The first researchers tried to make a distinction between the 'peaceful' Maya and the 'brutal' cultures of central Mexico", David Stuart wrote in a 2003 article. "They even tried to say human sacrifice was rare among the Maya." But in carvings and mural paintings, Stuart said: "we have now found more and greater similarities between the Aztecs and Mayas – including a Maya ceremony in which a grotesquely costumed priest is shown pulling the entrails from a bound and apparently living sacrificial victim." Stuart also noted evidence of child sacrifices.
Interviewed by the Sunday Times, Gibson defended the film before the attacks of the critics: "I didn't show half the stuff I read about. I read about an orgy of sacrifice: 20,000 people sacrificed in four days. They were also very fond of impaling genitals and torturing people for years on end. For instance, if they captured a king or queen from another place, they would humiliate them for a decade. They would cut off their lips, have their tongues ripped out, they would have no eyes and no ears. Oh, and they would chew their fingers off. The guy would be alive but was just a babbling mass of nerve endings, then they'd roll him up in a ball after nine years of this stuff and roll him down the temple stairs and pulverise him."
Hansen has defended research that had been done on the film. Hansen was asked to be technical adviser on the film after Gibson had seen one of Hansen's documentaries, called Dawn of the Maya, which was done at El Mirador in northern Guatemala. While Gibson's fictional story is set near the coast of Mexico's Yucatan during the collapse of Classic Maya civilization, Hansen's work in Guatemala's Mirador Basin serves, in large part, as the movie's factual basis: "A lot of the overall ideas that are in the story come from El Mirador, there were a lot of individual scenes that we provided for him [Gibson]. Working on the set was a time machine for me. The Maya houses were exactly like you would expect to see - the corn husks, the pottery shards, the feathers and textiles, the baskets and mats on the ground."[34]
Asked about if there was any historicity of the physical portrayal of the Mayas in Apocalypto in regards to the makeup and body paint, Hansen responded: "Oh, absolutely. I spent hours and hours going through the pottery and the images looking for tattoos. The scarification and tattooing was all researched, the inlaid jade teeth are in there, the ear spools are in there. There is a little doohickey that comes down from the ear through the nose into the septum – that was entirely their artistic innovation."[34] A subtle but interesting example of authenticity in tattooing is found on the left arm of Seven, Jaguar Paw's wife - a horizontal band with two dots above; the Mayan symbol for the number 'seven'.
A
screenshot of Jaguar Paw's wife, Seven, showing a tattoo on her arm in the design
of the Mayan symbol for the number 7.In addition, Hansen states that the "scenes
of people running around with elaborate body paint and bones pierced through their
noses"[34] had also some artistic licence on Gibson's part. In response to
how violent the Mayas were in the film, Hansen commented: "We know warfare
was going on. The Postclassic center of Tulum is a walled city; these sites had
to be in defensive positions. There was tremendous Aztec influence by this time.
The Aztecs were clearly ruthless in their conquest and pursuit of sacrificial
victims, a practice that spilled over into some of the Maya areas."
Other areas where the film has been criticized for some inaccuracy and liberties taken include the scene where Jaguar Paw and the rest of captives are used as target practice. Archaeologist Jim Brady of Cal State L.A has responded that he has not heard of any evidence of the Mayas staging such a scene, while Hansen states: "The process of using these individuals as target practice is a real possibility. I couldn't say it did happen, but I couldn't say it didn't either. [Gibson] wanted to have some reason to have the guys go after Rudy Youngblood, to go after the hero - . That was entirely Mel's scenario – but it's highly reasonable."
Apocalypto writer and producer Farhad Safinia did extensive research in conjunction with the making of the film, using several sources including the Popol Vuh. In the audio commentary of the film's first DVD release, Safinia states that the myth in the old shaman's story (played by Espiridion Acosta Cache who is an actual modern day Maya storyteller) told at night to the people of the village had been taken from a Mesoamerican tale retranslated into Yucatec Maya with Safinia's own additions.
Plot
While
hunting Baird's Tapir in the Mesoamerican jungle, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood),
his father Flint Sky (Morris Birdyellowhead), and their fellow tribesmen encounter
a procession of traumatized and fearful refugees. The procession's leader explains
that their lands have been ravaged, and with Flint Sky's permission are allowed
to pass through the forest. When Jaguar Paw and his tribesmen return to their
village, Flint Sky tells his son not to let the procession's state of fear seep
into him. At night, the tribe's elder tells the village a fable of man forever
unable to fill his want, despite having been given the capabilities of all of
the animals. The villagers follow the story with music and dance, leaving Jaguar
Paw to ponder.
The next morning, Jaguar Paw wakes from a nightmare to see strangers enter the village and set the huts ablaze. The raiders, led by Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo), attack and subdue the villagers. Jaguar Paw slips out with his pregnant wife Seven (Dalia Hernández) and his little son Turtles Run, lowering them on a vine into a small cave (a chultun, shaped something like a well)[1] to hide them. Jaguar Paw returns to the village to fight the raiders but is subdued with the rest of the tribe. A raider whom Jaguar Paw attacked and almost killed, the vicious Middle Eye (Gerardo Taracena), slits Flint Sky's throat in front of his son.
Maya city rulers look up to the approaching solar
eclipseBefore the raiders leave the village with their prisoners, one suspicious
raider severs the vine leading into the ground cave, trapping Jaguar Paw's wife
and son within. The raiders and their captives trek toward the Maya city, encountering
failed maize crops and slaves producing plaster. They also pass a small girl with
leprosy (alternatively congenital syphilis) who, after entering a trance-like
state, prophesies to the raiders that their end is near, including details of
darkness in the middle of the day and a man bringing a jaguar. In the city's outskirts,
the female captives are sold as slaves and the males are escorted to the top of
a step pyramid. The high priest sacrifices several captives by pulling out their
hearts and decapitating them. When Jaguar Paw is about to be sacrificed, a solar
eclipse stays the priest's hand. The priest declares the sun god Kukulkan satisfied
with the sacrifices. The eclipse passes, and light returns to the world.
Zero Wolf, told to dispose of the captives by the priest, takes them to a ball field. The captives are released in pairs and forced to run the length of the field to win their freedom. The warriors target them with javelins, arrows, and slingstones as they run. Jaguar Paw is struck by an arrow through the abdomen but reaches the end of the field and removes the arrow tip. Zero Wolf's son, Cut Rock, approaches to finish him off with an obsidian blade, but Jaguar Paw stabs him through the jaw with the arrow tip. As Cut Rock dies a painful death, Jaguar Paw escapes through a withered maize field and an open mass grave. The enraged Zero Wolf pursues Jaguar Paw into the jungle with his fellow raiders. The chase leads back to the forest. One of the raiders is killed by a black jaguar that has been disturbed by Jaguar Paw. As he flees, Jaguar Paw jumps over a high waterfall and survives, declaring from the riverbank below that the raiders are now in his territory.
Zero Wolf's raiders fall to both the forest's elements and Jaguar Paw's traps. A heavy rain sets in, which begins to flood the ground cave in which Jaguar Paw's wife and son are still trapped. Jaguar Paw defeats Middle Eye in hand-to-hand combat and kills Zero Wolf by leading him into a trap meant for hunting tapir. He is chased by two remaining raiders out to a beach where they encounter Spanish conquistadores and missionaries making their way ashore in boats. The amazement of the raiders allows Jaguar Paw to flee. He returns into the forest to rescue his wife and son from the cave. He finds that his wife has given birth to a healthy second son, and the family is rescued. Jaguar Paw's wife briefly asks what the strange objects near the shore are. Jaguar Paw responds only that "they bring men". Jaguar Paw's wife then asks if they should go greet the strangers. Jaguar Paw's wife's face is then given a close up as if implying to Maya historians that she will eventually become La Malinche[citation needed]. Jaguar Paw and his family go deeper into the forest, leaving the conquistadores anchored in ships off the beach.
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