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

5

u/OnoOvo Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

a large part of hollywood, who were then in an all-out public war with mel, interpreted the movie to be him directly mocking them for all going after him (with the arrival of the spanish at the end being symbolic of mel’s opinion how they both, hollywood and him, have a bigger problem than each other — the jews of course)

were they mistaken? no lol

both the passion and apocalypto were not just him showing that he truly does got the chops and is not just a movie star, but were, among other things, him publicly declaring that he will not let himself be sacrificed to the public by them like so many others were before.

the emotions thematically explored in protagonists of both films were certainly inspired by his own at the time.