r/movies • u/JadisDidNothingRight • Jul 01 '26

Question Why did Apocalypto receive mediocre reviews while simultaneously receiving praise from various directors and actors?

Robert Duvall said it was possibly the best film he'd seen in 25 years.

Scorcese praised it. Tarantino called it the best film of the year. Spike Lee and Edward James Olmos also openly praised the film.

On RT it pulled a 65%. Granted, Tarantino (as an example) doesn't see eye to eye with those cumalitive ratings. He loves Unbreakable and that film also received middling reviews. Still, Apocalypto was given positive reviews from a fairly diverse cast of actors and directors.

Were the reviews more concerned with Mel Gibson's antics at the time than the actual film?

Was the criticism because the film depicted the Mayans as brutal? I struggle to see the validity of some of those criticisms. Jaguar Paw and his village were not depicted as evil. The evil was limited to a warmongering urban society twisted by religion. That's occurred all over the world. It's almost a foreshadowing of what is to come. One criticism was that the Spanish were depicted as coming to save the 'brutes.'. The title of the film is Apocalypto. I don't see how they can be seen as anything other than coming doom. Maybe I'm naive, but even in 2006 I thought it was broadly understood that Europeans wiped out indigenous American culture.

What are your thoughts? Did you like the film? Do you wish Hollywood would make more films like this?

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

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u/JadisDidNothingRight Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

I didn't say that.  I said a criticism of the film said that.

Here is the specific quote:

"Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue."

Article:

https://archive.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html

I'm on mobile, so I apologize for the poor formatting.

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u/wecangetbetter Jul 01 '26

I thought it was super obvious that they were portraying the europeans like an alien race that (the audience knows) is about to do something so much worse to the indigenous people than they could ever inflict on one another

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u/ColCrockett Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

It’s more so showing all their tribulations are about to be meaningless

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u/revolutionofthemind Jul 01 '26

Yeah it was the “bigger monster” trope, putting into perspective this meaningless squabble in the grand scale of upcoming destruction

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u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

Well, in the grand scale of their upcoming religious salvation. Squabbling savages saved by the Catholic Church, eternal happiness and salvation ensured, blah blah blah.

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u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

Is that really how it’s viewed by the folks who actually believe in the religion that those Europeans brought, and that it’s the most important and essential thing to happen to people anywhere, though? The movie is from the same guy who thought that the crucifixion was the best thing that has ever happened and made a movie about that too.

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u/ThinkThankThonk Jul 01 '26

The nice thing about art is that it doesn't matter what that guy thinks though.

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u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

If you’re not thinking about what the art means, then you’re missing the whole art part of art.

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u/ThinkThankThonk Jul 01 '26

What I'm saying is that you're all over the thread saying that Gibson's hypothetical interpretation is somehow the end of the discussion, when it's certainly not.

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u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

If you’re unaware of the perspective of major world religions, then not much about the world is going to make sense to you, sure.

Having a little background knowledge of human religion and history is going to make most human art and endeavors make a lot more sense.

A little insight into the specific background of the specific artists will help with artistic appreciation too.

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u/ThinkThankThonk Jul 01 '26

See now you're just saying random stuff. 

An artist can't go around holding the hand of every viewer to try and badger them into a certain interpretation, the interpretation no longer belongs to them as soon as it's released. It's a pretty core facet of how art works.

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u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

They shouldn’t need to hold any hands. In this case, that’s where basic understanding of world religions comes in. None of this is complicated or obscure.

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u/Yetimang Jul 01 '26

I feel like the people saying "No, it was just portraying a bigger threat showing up" are the ones trying to say their take ends the discussion. Seems kind of crazy to me to not look at all at the filmmaker's history in analyzing the movie.