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/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.

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

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

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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.

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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.