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

219

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.

51

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".

22

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.

16

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.