- This movie is not as violent as I had been led to believe. It is violent, I was just expecting something worse than Braveheart and it wasn’t even as violent as that one, even though this movie has not one but two up-close human sacrifices.
- Mel goes for the gross out about five minutes into the film when he makes the guy eat TAPIR TESTICLES. Holy fuck was that disgusting.
- The animatronic jaguar was really, really fake looking. Not so much the [version of the same] jaguar that chased Jaguar Paw through the jungle afterwards, since that could very well have been a real one edited into the chase sequence, but the one in the tree not so much. Especially the jaguar cub: SO FAKE. Jesus, Mel, it’s not like you don’t know how to do this stuff, the horses in Braveheart were fairly realistic.
- I really liked how they handled the transfer of location from small rural village to bustling urban metropolis (relatively speaking). The costuming was really effective in that part, as were the displays of the trappings of an actual civilization.
- Why do they always make creepy little kids the bringers of bad omens? And why do these kids always have to use vocabularies too big for their developmental stage as well as unnecessarily whispered tones? Bah.
- I was disappointed that there actually wasn’t more jungle-style warfare. They chase after Jaguar Paw with clubs and axes and knives, variations of which can be found in most other movies of this sort. It was cool when Jaguar Paw made the blow darts using the frog poison, but I wish they had done more with that sort of ingenuity rather than relying on everyone throwing spears all the time. I mean, you get the impression that these people know their surroundings very well and know how to work their environment to their advantage (e.g. the tapir trap at the start of the movie) and yet there is very little stealth or subtlety when it comes to using this to their advantage during the big chase scene that takes up the second half of the film.
- I love, love, love it when a prisoner is given a ten second head start to escape before his captors try to take him out. “If you can run across this dusty ground and into the corn field, we’ll let you go free! PS We’ll be shooting arrows at you as you escape.” I never understand why these guys always run in a straight line while doing these things, and it took the second pair of runners (the pair that included Jaguar Paw) to figure out that running back and forth in a diagonal motion would help him dodge most of the projectiles.
- So, so gross when the main antagonist got stuck in the tapir trap. Ugh. And you saw it coming from a mile away too, which made it infinitely worse.
- Large ships filled with Europeans (and disease!) show up at the end. They have flags, you see.
Apocalypto
I think I’m the only person on the planet who bothered to see this.
IMDB Plot Synopsis As the Mayan kingdom faces its decline, the rulers insist the key to prosperity is to build more temples and offer human sacrifices. Jaguar Paw, a young man captured for sacrifice, flees to avoid his fate.