The Passion experience\u2013especially the part in which critics hurled anti-Semitism charges at Gibson, an ultraconservative Roman Catholic whose father has questioned whether the Holocaust happened\u2013thickened Gibson\u2019s hide along with his wallet. So if there are complaints about Apocalypto\u2019s portrayal of human sacrifice by the Maya, whose mostly impoverished descendants today are a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre for liberals, Gibson says he won\u2019t care. \u201cAfter what I experienced with The Passion, I frankly don\u2019t give a flying f___ about much of what those critics think.\u201d<\/p>\n
Still, he likes to confound expectations\u2013he wears a cross containing relics of martyred saints, but he can swear like a Quentin Tarantino character\u2013and those who peg him as a reactionary may be surprised to learn that his new film sounds warnings straight out of liberal Hollywood\u2019s bible. Apocalypto, which Gibson loosely translates from the Greek as \u201ca new beginning,\u201d was inspired in large part by his work with the Mirador Basin Project, an effort to preserve a large swath of the Guatemalan rain forest and its Maya ruins. Gibson and his rookie cowriter on Apocalypto, Farhad Safinia, were captivated by the ancient Maya, one of the hemisphere\u2019s first great civilizations, which reached its zenith about A.D. 600 in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. The two began poring over Maya myths of creation and destruction, including the Popol Vuh, and research suggesting that ecological abuse and war-mongering were major contributors to the Maya\u2019s sudden collapse, some 500 years before Europeans arrived in the Americas.<\/p>\n
Those apocalyptic strains haunt Apocalypto, which takes place in an opulent but decaying Maya kingdom, whose leaders insist that if the gods are not appeased by more temples and human sacrifices, the crops will die. But the writers hope that the larger themes of decline will be a wake-up call. \u201cThe parallels between the environmental imbalance and corruption of values that doomed the Maya and what\u2019s happening to our own civilization are eerie,\u201d says Safinia. Gibson, who insists ideology matters less to him than stories of \u201cpenitential hardship\u201d like his Oscar-winning Braveheart, puts it more bluntly: \u201cThe fearmongering we depict in this film reminds me a little of President Bush and his guys.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Thanks, as ever, to Jeffrey Overstreet<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Time magazine has an interesting article up now on Mel Gibson\u2018s mysterious upcoming movie Apocalypto \u2014 and given how Gibson\u2019s previous movie, The Passion of the Christ, was promoted heavily through the right-wing media, it is interesting to see Gibson take aim at both sides of the political fence, here: The Passion experience\u2013especially the part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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