Apocalypto: Mel Gibson’s Cannibal Holocaust

It’s been said that movies can be divided in three categories: the good, the bad, and the unnecessary. For some reason I still don’t understand, Apocalypto (2006) has been classified as good. Very good, indeed, if IMDB ratings are taken into consideration. Apocalypto tells the story of Jaguar Paw, the survivor of the fury and violence of a rival tribe that slaves, slaughters and uses their subdued enemies as human sacrifices for their gods. Sometimes slightly dramatic, but intensely and graphically violent all the time, the movie shows the struggle of this honored man to save his family from the horror of the alleged 15th century life in the uncivilized America.

Cannibal Holocaust is a 1980 Italian movie, banned in several countries and considered to be one of the most hideous movies of all times. The plot is simple and straightforward: an American film crew disappeared during an expedition to the Amazon forest, in a place known as “green hell” (home of the most savage and cruel cannibal Indian tribes ever seen...). A rescue team is then gathered to fly to the spot, to the very region where those tribes (Yanomamo and Shamatari, according the movie) lived. (It’s opportune to remember that the tribes mentioned in the movie exist but are not fierce enemies as implied in the movie, neither showed signs of true cannibalism.) There, they discover that the missing crew had been taken as human sacrifices (could it be different....?). After extensive negotiations with the natives, the rescue team retrieves the film rolls of the missing colleagues, which would be used as the starting point for a documentary film. They take the rolls back and watch the images together. The scenes registered in those rolls are the state-of-art of cruelty, violence and horror. What surprises the would-be producers of this documentary is that not only the natives, but also the missing group perpetrated extreme acts of violence. Besides that, the group showed signs of being quite pleased while filming the attacks, rapes and slaughters. There is even a try of calling the audience to conscience (when the producer laments: "I wonder who the real cannibals are”), but the result is, of course, sheer graphic depicting of unnecessary and disturbing violence. Total crap, if there is still any doubt about it.

Immediately after the movie’s premiere in Italy, the director Ruggero Deodato was arrested and charged with accusations of having made a snuff film (a sick genre of movies in which violence is real and actors are really injured, usually against their will...) as well as sponsoring cruelty against animals. The producers were also called to prove that extreme violence scenes (such as the infamous impalement scene) had been staged and were not real. So, the result was that all this mess served as advertisement for the movie.

Does this have anything to do with Apocalypto? No, of course not. Apocalypto is a hundred-million-dollar movie, produced under all technical care. Absolutely, no animals have been injured during filming. Every scene has been carefully prepared so the realism is an illusion, not a real issue. It’s also interesting that the film depicts generic native tribes — politically correct attitude, there is no direct criticism against a specific minority (although I still ask myself why Indian tribes are the preferred groups when someone wants to talk about human violence and cruelty...) Besides that, special care was taken to avoid nudity and any other kind of sex-related scenes (nice appeal for modern, say, conservative groups, isn’t it?). Anyway, why so much violence? Why so realistic depiction of cannibalism rituals, with human-heart-eating-people and rolling heads serving as a panis et circensis spectacle? Is it the kind of cinema we intend to foster? Why those JackAss-like sketches at the beginning of the movie? Man, I cannot figure it out — what a gross sense of humour. I’m slightly inclined to believe that the same ingredient — the realism of the disturbing scenes, once a motivation for the ban applied to several horror films around the world — has been the wonder of Gibson’s enterprise.

Where is the boundary between the need to say something and the need to shock?  What kind of emotions and reactions one intends to evoke when detailed depiction of violence is shown? It’s certainly thrilling for some, I might say that it’s actually a selling point for many, but is that the best target to be aimed?

Take the Apocalypto’s plot; subtract the flesh-eating scenes, the decapitations, the blood squirts, the piles of beheaded corpses decomposing on the sand — what’s the remainder? Would it be enough to fill half an hour of projection? Wouldn’t it be as hollow as the Cannibal Holocaust’s script without the Holocaust scenes? Unnecessary, that’s the tag which applies for both.

Rogerio Maciel,

March, 2011.