Apocalypto

Don't bother. I am beginning to think The Passion was a fluke.

Here we have (this would be a spoiler alert if the ending wasn't so obvious from the get-go) the energizer bunny hero dancing on the boundary between the improbable and the impossible, all the while remaining firmly in the predictable. Add some hokey synth "world" music and a good dose of Deus ex machina (OK, Mel, having that come with a friar bearing the Cross was cute) and you have it. Oh yeah, and gobs of blood.

Now, anything that shows how bloody and awful Mayan/Toltec/Aztec civilizations were is probably a good dose of reality in a culture that thinks that all Indians were nature-loving peacemongers whose world was cruelly destroyed by the mean Europeans. However, couldn't Gibson have come up with a better story?

In 1502 they must have already had the telegraph, because the ending was obvious from about the third scene.

Anyway, I am beginning to think that Mel has a fetish for blue paint (and, well, blood). Perhaps he should have just gone DADA and had Jaguar Paw deliver his fist-shaking manifesto in a Scottish brogue. At least it would have been funny. And we can all be thankful that the film did not come with a rant about the Jews starting all those wars (or the tagline: Mesoamerican Slaughter: the holocaust even Hutton doesn't deny).

On the good side of the ledger, it was visually appealing, even with the muppet Jaguar, and offered an interesting view of what a Mayan city looked like. Coming home, I pulled out a couple of Mexican history books, and it seems that the costumes were pretty accurate (I never realized that the ghetto-chic thing of putting jewels in the teeth had pre-Columbian antecedents, but I found two sources describing this, so I imagine that it is pretty accurate).

My rating is low: one star (better than Cats, but, hey, what isn't?). It seems, from reports from the girls, that Charlotte's Web is the better film. I am sure I will be seeing it on DVD when it comes out. I will not be seeing Mel's Turkey again.