Beating hearts are hacked from bodies; throats are slit; heads are bounced down the steps of pyramids. Just the sort of thing to send holidaymakers rushing off to Mexico? The Mexican Tourist Board evidently thinks so. Last Wednesday, it invited travel journalists to a briefing in London relating to the new Mel Gibson film Apocalypto, at which it promised to “highlight some of the best locations from the film, such as the Veracruz Trail and the Mayan Jungle, as outstanding tourist destinations”.
I didn’t make it to the briefing, but I did see a preview of the film in Soho the night before, and location isn’t exactly central to it. Nor is history. This may purport to be a story about the decline of the Maya, but it has nothing on the rise that preceded the fall, nothing on the developments in maths and astronomy that went with the ritual bloodletting. Its dialogue may be entirely in Yucatec Maya, but Apocalypto is essentially a chase-and-vengeance movie, a Mad Max in which the villains are high priests rather than hell’s angels.
The hero, Jaguar Paw, is living the life of a happy hunter when his village is brutally attacked by city-building Maya. He manages to hide his pregnant wife and their son but is powerless to save his father from having his throat slit. He and his fellow villagers are force-marched to a pyramid city to become human sacrifices. Having seen several of his friends dispatched, he is awaiting his turn on the slab when a solar eclipse signals that the gods have, for the moment, had their fill of blood.
The same, unfortunately, is not true of Jaguar Paw’s captors. They point him at his beloved forest and tell him to run, while they rain down on him spears and arrows. Though unarmed, he manages to see off the son of his tormentors’ leader, and thus provoke the chase that takes up the second half of the film. Can he, despite the wound in his abdomen, survive the giant waterfall, elude his pursuers, return to his village, and save his wife and son (and coming baby), before the rains drown them in their hiding place? Well, he’s not named after a cat for nothing.
The film doesn’t open here until the New Year. It’s not giving away too much to say that, minutes from the end, Jaguar Paw emerges on to a beach to find a party of conquistadors and missionaries — a historical nonsense. As with Jaguar Paw’s baby, their arrival is premature — in their case by several hundred years.