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Release Date: December 8, 2006

After some delays, Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is finally scheduled to hit theaters on December 8th. Like his previous opus, The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is done entirely in a foreign language with subtitles. And just like the last time, audiences are in for a treat.

Apocalypto tells the story of Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young warrior on the outskirts of the Mayan civilization whose wife is pregnant with their second child. Early one morning, Mayan warriors attack their village and take many of the tribesmen and women captive whereupon they are forced to march to a Mayan city. They learn that they are to be sacrificed to appease the gods but, as all the commercials and trailers have indicated, Jaguar Paw is not ready to die.

It does not take long for the hand of a great director to become evident, and in Apocalypto it is obvious early on that a master has fashioned the film for us. There is creativity in the shots; deftness in handling the actors; coherence between subject and presentation; a sense that every small part is working fluidly in the larger whole. When a director knows how to please the eye and when an experienced editor can subtly weave the shots together a critic’s work becomes difficult, because it is easy to slip into a fascinated trance like the rest of the audience rather than examine the piece with an actively discriminating eye. Such is the case with Apocalypto, which demonstrates that Mel Gibson is as talented as any director in the business.

But there is something else that Mr. Gibson does remarkably well, something that is often difficult even for talented directors: he brings a familiar humanity to the most foreign of subjects and situations. Historical epics are notoriously unconcerned with the little details, filled with kings sitting on thrones making bold pronouncements, sweeping battles scenes and very little of the everyday life. Like stereotypes, these films show little concern for nuance, complexity or delicate detail, preferring to paint in bold, wide brushstrokes.

But with Apocalypto Mel Gibson gives us something more. To cite just one example, at the top of the Mayan pyramid where men are sacrificed the royal family (we presume them to be such) sits regally watching the proceedings. The patriarch and matriarch are with their son and daughter, all of them dressed up to the Mayan nines. Most directors would stop right there, but Mel Gibson delves into it a bit. He gives us a shot of the teenage daughter rolling her eyes in boredom: she’s seen this before and she would rather be somewhere else. When the royal couple stand to face their subjects, the young son tugs on his mother’s robes, demanding attention, and she surreptitiously slaps at his clutching hands and shoos him away.

These two little moments add a whole new perspective to the scene. Teenage daughters, even royal ones, were probably not drastically different from those of today, nor were pre-pubescent sons. It’s a very human moment in the middle of such an epic scene, and it is things like this that lift Apocalypto above other like movies with a decent but not phenomenal script (moments like that are also partly why The Fellowship of the Ring was better than parts two and three of that trilogy).

Another notable aspect of Apocalypto is Mel Gibson’s frankness in dealing with the subject. In an age when some ideologies seek to belittle other cultures while others bristle at the mere possibility of a concept like cultural superiority, Mr. Gibson approaches the theme with a brutal honesty about who the Mayans were (at least to the extent that we know them) and what they did. He never condescends, but neither does he excuse. Even when he paints the Mayans at their most brutal he does not make them caricatures or stereotypes. The murdering Mayan warriors are given their human side too.

There is one surprising downside to the movie, a downside which I am quite at a loss to explain, and it has to do with the ending. I’ll say no more but any individual reasonably well educated in the Classical Period of the Mayans – for we have been led to understand that the movie occurs near the end of this period – is going to raise his eyebrows. Indeed, I am still not sure what exactly was going on there, but I’ll leave that for the viewer to discover on his own. Suffice it to say that it does very little to detract from an otherwise impeccable movie and a great experience in the theater. This year might not be a lost cause after all.