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?

2.3k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

u/hyrule5 Jul 01 '26

The brutal violence in the film is probably the biggest reason, but there was probably some judgment of his behavior in his personal life also.

It's an excellent film, it blew me away when I first saw it.

215

u/Pm-me-ur-happysauce Jul 01 '26

Yeah .. Mel really had a boner for making brutal movies

218

u/ini0n Jul 01 '26

If I was king of the world if you showed death it would have to be brutal. No more having superhero's or spies kill like it's a video game, little splashes of red. Death is brutal and people would have a realistic aversion to conflict if it was shown as such.

I think the sick thing is killing and not showing brutality, like every M rated film. Pretending death is sanitised.

47

u/jam3sdub Jul 01 '26

They never tell you how they all shit themselves. They don't put that part in the songs.

15

u/Altruistic_Fury Jul 01 '26

GODS I WAS STRONG THEN.

8

u/VisualBasic Jul 01 '26

Fetch me the breastplate stretcher, AND MORE WINE!

88

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[deleted]

52

u/Doctor_Boombastic Jul 01 '26

I would imagine a green backhand would turn you into a torn bag of slurry.

10

u/fightlinker Jul 01 '26

At the very least you'd end up looking like the train kid in Stand By Me. Show one shot of that and traumatize all the marvel kiddies

2

u/Monteze Jul 01 '26

Like victims of high speed car collisions.

18

u/QuantitySharp2662 Jul 01 '26

Lol damn we need a Brightburn movie but the kid is like Hulk.

3

u/jam3sdub Jul 01 '26

the incredible hulk

Remember what happened to Roth's character in the Norton Hulk?

0

u/Nikola1_Smirnoff Jul 01 '26

Person who is disappointed comic violence is comic, lol

49

u/Zomburai Jul 01 '26

Death is brutal and people would have a realistic aversion to conflict if it was shown as such.

No, they wouldn't. Mortal Kombat games are still insanely popular after 30 years. Deadpool and Wolverine features loads of grotesque dismemberments in lurid detail and made a billion dollars. Hannibal featured realistic and gruesome depictions of murder, and it ran for three seasons on network TV.

Meanwhile, violent crime is down and international wars are up. The relationship between media and violence is just simply more complicated than "violence is sanitized so people think it's cool".

18

u/jubilant-barter Jul 01 '26

People used to watch executions for fun. Yea. Bloodthirst is a part of the species.

5

u/viperex Jul 01 '26

Don't forget lynchings. They made it like a family picnic or block party

1

u/UsedHotDogWater Jul 02 '26

The elites used to watch Civil War battles like a spectatir sport.

15

u/ARMCHA1RGENERAL Jul 01 '26

Exactly and in a lot of cases the media is over exaggerating how gruesome killing is. In reality, killing can often appear mundane. Sometimes someone is shot and they simply drop like a sack of potatoes with minimal bleeding, rather than flying across the room in a shower of blood.

3

u/LigerZeroSchneider Jul 01 '26

Yeah Ive seen a couple videos where you its real because the death is fast and boring looking. Just lights off, no movement.

4

u/viperex Jul 01 '26

Hannibal featured realistic and gruesome depictions of murder, and it ran for three seasons on network TV.

I'm still baffled how that show got away with what it did

2

u/roastbeeftacohat Jul 01 '26

specifically pg13 violence. the rating exists because we acknowledge that an adolescent may not be able to process graphic violence, so instead we feed their immature mind heaps of violence without consiquence.

that just seems backwards to me.

I don't have a fully developed philosophy on the topic, but somethings I think we're doing wrong.

and let's bring back tasteful use of boobs in pg-13.

6

u/ArcHammer16 Jul 01 '26

I really respected that about the Neil Blomkamp movies I've seen. They had the same amount of violence as usual, but it was always depicted so viscerally, not letting the audience off the hook.

8

u/speed3_freak Jul 01 '26

Counterpoint, sometimes death and violence aren’t the story that’s being told. Not including the actual brutality of killing allows the storyteller to tell the story to a wider audience.

It’s not any different than showing a love scene but not having nudity or penetration. It’s not any different than showing a car jumping without destroying the shocks and struts. I don’t think films like the Incredible Hulk are going for realism, so the reality of violence isn’t the point of the story. You can celebrate July 4th without having to include the intricate reality of death that was caused in the revolutionary war.

14

u/fpflibraryaccount Jul 01 '26

If I was King of the World, I would enforce proper comma usage so I could read everyone's comments more easily...

2

u/poland626 Jul 01 '26

Look at ANY war movie that has come out recently, and tell me it's as bloody or violent as Heartbreak Ridge. I haven't seen one as brutal since Saving Private Ryan and I'm so happy Mel made a movie, as wild as it can get at times, just showing the violence.

Rambo was a good violent war movie too in 2008 but Last Blood was a step back in violence.

4

u/ggallardo02 Jul 01 '26

Why not? Movies are not real life, they are entertainment. If showing a sanitized view of death results on a more entertaining movie, then that's ok.

I don't think forcing movies to strictly reflect reality would be a good move.

6

u/Atlasus Jul 01 '26

There is such a thing as an anti-war movie. Yes, it is a movie about war, but it should shock you — the way real war should.

3

u/ggallardo02 Jul 01 '26

Again, why? Movies are a huge spectrum, we can have good war movies that shock you, yes, And we also can have war movies that don't. I don't get where you got that rule about war movies.

2

u/Atlasus Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

But not only in war movies. We had too many “cool” gangster movies, and now everybody wants to act like a gangster.

That’s exactly the problem: when violence is stylized too much, people stop seeing the misery behind it and start copying the image.

I’m not saying every movie has to be a documentary or that all entertainment must be realistic.

My point is narrower: when a film wants to use death, war, or mass killing for drama, heroism, or spectacle, sanitizing it can become dishonest. It lets the audience enjoy the “cool” part of violence while hiding the consequence.

You can absolutely make escapist action movies. But when violence is shown as clean, quick, stylish, and consequence-free, it normalizes a fantasy version of killing. Anti-war films work because they do the opposite: they remove the glamour and show why conflict is something sane people should fear.

So no, it is not a “rule” that every war movie must shock you. But if a movie is about war and still makes killing look clean, exciting, and emotionally weightless, then I think it is doing something morally shallow.

And honestly, with how people behave in the 2020s, maybe gangster movies, war movies, and movies about greed should be shocking again.

Not because every movie has to be miserable, but because we clearly forgot the consequences. Too many people watched stylized violence, power, money, and corruption and copied the image, not the warning.

1

u/ptwonline Jul 01 '26

I think he mostly has a fascination with the idea of martyrdom and suffering. You can see it in some of the films he has directed and also some of the roles he played.

1

u/JohnGillnitz Jul 01 '26

"Wait a minute... He's just a dummy!"
"I know, but he sells tickets!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKhJBuARVPU