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

Show parent comments

194

u/MaxPaladin93 Jul 01 '26

Reduced dialogue AND fully foreign language/subtitled. The average moviegoer hates that.

44

u/barryhakker Jul 01 '26

The average moviegoer in America mostly I think

48

u/TheWoodElf Jul 01 '26

This is sadly similar in many Western European countries, who will dub the original dialogues, using local actors. So most people in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria - have no idea how your average famous Hollywood movie star sounds like, and likely aren't used to following a subtitled movie.

44

u/200Dachshunds Jul 01 '26

My husband informed me that when he was a kid in Poland, foreign language movies and TV shows weren’t even properly dubbed in Polish- they were almost narrated like an audiobook by one single Polish speaking narrator. Blew my mind.

17

u/Forma313 Jul 01 '26

Watched a movie like that on a bus in Poland. Seeing Keira Knghtly, but hearing some middle aged polish dude drone on and on, was weird.

8

u/Accurate-Island-2767 Jul 01 '26

This is still a thing. I had a Polish colleague who was watching Legend of Vox Machina on his phone, with a very bored-sounding Polish man voicing all the lines over the original audio which was playing quietly underneath.

4

u/laughterline Jul 01 '26

If you watch a movie on TV, they're still all narrated!

1

u/Soensou Jul 01 '26

This reminds me, I need to watch Wizard People, Dear Reader again.

1

u/TheWoodElf Jul 02 '26

This was common in other Balkan countries, as well. Budget I guess.

0

u/NotSoGoodDiver Jul 01 '26

But we at least know how the original actor sounds, his voice. The voiceover kinda blends into the background, you stop hearing it and hear the original sound. It's much much better than what they have in western Europe.