“I am Jaguar Paw! This is my forest! My sons and their sons will hunt here after I am gone!”

Justin’s Rating: I think this movie was a big mistake. All I do is talk for two hours — I don’t shoot anybody. What was I thinking?

Justin’s Review: We as a culture have a terrifically hard time separating a movie from the people who made it. Unlike a book, which you more or less take as it is, we cannot avoid celebrity scandals, personal politics, and unsavory associations that come with the fallible human cast and crew. From Roman Polanski’s statutory rape to Frank Sinatra’s connection to the Mafia to Brad dumping Jennifer for Angelina, we seem incapable of both avoiding and sifting out what’s truly important about the people who make a movie and whether it should impact our view of the actual film.

I’m of a mind that about 90% of anyone’s personal life is just that: personal. Only when they’re unrepentant about crimes in their life or when they deliberately use a movie to justify their own corrupted lifestyle does it begin to concern me. Is it an OK thing to protest an actor or director by not seeing their movie? I suppose, but it depends on how convicted you are of who they are or what they’ve done, weighed against whether the movie itself deserves avoidance because of connections it can’t help. I think the best thing to do is to ask yourself: in thirty years, how do you think this movie will hold up on its own, and will it be worth watching then? If you think it might be, then it’s worth watching now.

So we roll around to Apocalypto, Mel Gibson’s directorial follow-up to The Passion of the Christ, and we have to ask ourselves… does Gibson’s connection to the movie deserve any personal bannings? While never really outside of the public spotlight, Gibson launched into near-record levels in the spotlight with a one-two punch of The Passion and a drunken rant during a police stop. Movies about Christ almost always court controversy (just ask Kevin Smith or Martin Scorsese), and Gibson’s rant against the Jews during a traffic stop in 2006 didn’t help matters.

Hollywood has its own wonky morality, where some types of “public” outrages are judged more harshly, and for a while it looked as if no one would touch the Oscar-winner’s new project with a 10-foot pole. Disney considered dropping support, but finally released it under the Buena Vista title (Gibson financed the movie himself). It did decent box office, taking in about three times its budget, and for all the attempts at slapping it with a controversial label, the hubbub around the movie died fairly quickly.

So, 30 years from now, when none of Gibson’s antics or history matters, what will be Apocalytpo’s legacy? Surprisingly, I think it might be remembered for being a pretty cross-blend of The Last of the Mohicans and Die Hard — which is something I did NOT expect when I rented the film.

Apocalypto is essentially two movies in one. Filmed in the lush jungles of Mexico, and using the Yucatec Mayan language (nice big subtitles are there for the few of you who have yet to become fluent in this), we are introduced to a small tribe of Mayans living near the coastline. From hunting to procreating to telling bonfire tales, it’s the best summer camp ever. This all changes one day when a brutal squad of big-city Mayans sweep in and decimate the camp, taking prisoners back to the main city for a little indentured slavery and human sacrifice. This part of the movie is slow, deliberately letting us soak in this ancient culture while themes of decline, despair and anguish waft through our souls.

The second movie concerns one of the captured men named Jaguar Paw, who manages to escape his captors and flee back to his village, where his pregnant wife and son are trapped. At this point, we’re reintroduced to the one-man-vs-an-army scenario, which doesn’t seem quite so foreign, even in the jungle, particularly if you’ve seen movies like Surviving the Game, Under Seige or, well, pretty much every action movie since 1988. Jaguar seems to have a mystical bond with the jungle around him, which rises up to assist the young lad in escape and vengeance.

For the people who expected Apocalypto to be a gorgeous art film about the sociological goings-on of a culture long forgotten, the brutal action and gore that’s thrown in their faces is probably a bit of a turn-off. For the action junkies among us who want to see mass-scale battles and an invincible hero, the agonizing wait through eighty minutes of relative slowness is probably antithema to their natures. Even so, Apocalypto is worth a go, because it does what it does with its own stubborn style.

Without much exposition at all, we are treated to an insider’s view of the decline of the Mayan civilization on the eve of Spanish conquest. Drawing parallels between today and back then, the Mayans have become so oversaturated with entertainment and excess that they’ve stripped the land and trampled on the little guys to keep themselves satiated. Yet it’s still respectful of their civilization, which had accomplished so much in art, architecture and even science.

To round things out a bit, Gibson gives us a few good, natural laughs, one of the most spooky girls ever seen on film, and cinematography to die for. It all adds up to being a movie that’s neither a failure, nor a masterpiece, nor unforgettable — but may be something John McClane might approve of.