The Rot from Within by Prospero Pulma Jr.

The Rot from Within

By Prospero E. Pulma Jr.

After reaping critical and financial success for depicting Christ’s last hours in The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson hoists Apocalypto, his latest foray into subtitling films in archaic tongues and his exploration of the enigmatic Mayan civilization, before the world. Set during the decline of the Mayan empire and before the colonization of America, the film revolves around Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young hunter captured along with other tribesmen by marauding Holcane warriors led by Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo).

As their captors lead them farther from their Eden-like home in the jungle and deeper into Mayan territory, Jaguar Paw is greeted by signs of a people battered by nature and by their own folly–denuded forests, parched fields, frenzied limestone quarrying, and the diseased stumbling across their path. In the decaying Mayan city, ringed by the shanties of commoners and occupied in the center by ornate temples, he is assaulted by bizarre rituals topped by human sacrifices to appease a wrathful deity. The High Priest (Fernando Hernandez) zealously presides over the gruesome ceremony while the Mayan royalty watches passively.

Jaguar Paw does not resist when he is dragged to the sacrificial altar, although he has not yet resigned to his violent end. When the door home yawns slightly, he throws it wide open and races back to his wife, Seven (Dalia Hernandez), and son, Turtles Run (Carlos Emilio Baez), whose survival hinges on the fulfillment of his pledge to return. Taught by his father, Flint Sky (Morris Birdyellowhead), that fear afflicts man like a malady-wisdom reinforced by his brush with the desperate Mayans-he learns to purge his soul of fear and defends his abode from the vengeful Zero Wolf and the sadistic Middle Eye (Gerardo Taracena).

Apocalypto is not only an account of a man’s discovery of innate courage that surfaces when he runs out of crevices to hide in. It also creates a mosaic of contrasting images. Jaguar Paw’s domestic life and his people’s harmonious coexistence with nature stand brightly against the depravity of the Mayans and their ravaged environment. Their hunt for the tapir, though unpalatable to some, is benign when compared to the Mayan practice of combing the forests for captives to be auctioned at the market or be butchered on the altar. The dialogue, delivered entirely in the Mayan dialect, is sparse. But it is liberally sprinkled with the names of Mayan deities and folk beliefs, including faith in the afterlife, and the lines are credibly uttered by the cast. Flint Sky is not the only warm patriarch in the film. Zero Wolf sheds his sinister countenance when he is with his son, Cut Rock (Ricardo Diaz Mendoza).

All of these might be forgotten when the light shifts to the gratuitous bloodletting and stereotyping of the Mayans-accomplished astronomers, farmers, and engineers of the ancient world-as bloodthirsty savages. Mel Gibson may have broken limits in bringing authenticity to his film by allowing blood to flow freely from his characters, but by depicting excessive gore, his message rings louder that a people is conquered from within, be it by fear or depravity.