Apocalypto

The opening shot of Apocalypto is a nod and a wink to Coppola's opening gambit of Apocalypse Now: Coppola began with a silent shot of a tree line, broken only by the whirr of a helicopter as it passes through the frame. Gibson has the same, but substitutes the helicopter for a man racing across the screen in pursuit of a tapir. Gibson's new film has a lot in common with Coppola's, but Mel makes it even harder for the viewer to watch: his movie is in the ancient Mayan language. Gibson wears his influences on his sleeve throughout, as Apocalypto looks like it was directed by a Terrence Malick/Sergio Leone hybrid. The director takes his sweet time shooting endless-but-beautiful shots of vegetation and, like the movies of those two auteurs, Apocalypto's plot is small, but everything surrounding it is on a massive, grandiose scale. The story follows Jaguar Paw (Youngblood), a hunter living a happy life deep in the jungle. After a warring tribe decimates his village and drags him back to their city to be offered to the Mayan gods as a sacrifice, he escapes and takes the fight to his captors. With Gibson's recent blatant Christian motives, Apocalypto's Christ allegories are thankfully kept to a minimum; but religion and its influence on civilisation do play a massive part throughout. I'm no historian and have only basic knowledge of the Mayan empire - it was big (very big), and collapsed soon after Christian crusaders came ashore in the 15th century. But Gibson reckons that the civilisation was doomed anyway, with or without our 'the cross or the sword' politics, as he opens his film with a quote from W. Durant: "A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." Gibson, not the most subtle of filmmakers, goes to great lengths to convince us that the Mayans participated in death and depravity on a scale that would make Caligula jealous and this, along with famine and disease, resulted in its demise. When he's not making that point, Gibson lets the visuals and the acting tell the story, and both are flawless. An epic - despite the severed heads, the torture, rape and brutal killings - hasn't looked this beautiful since Lawrence Of Arabia, while Youngblood, for an unknown, carries the film firmly on his shoulders.