His Catholicism is certainly relevant, given that the people he’s portraying would eventually be decimated by rapacious followers of Gibson’s own faith, and it’s interesting that the film implies the arrival of Christians in the Americas would ultimately be a bad thing. Of course, it is ‘Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto’, and other aspects of his personality permeate. The shadow of the Holocaust does fall over the film’s second act, as our harried hero Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) clambers desperately over a mass grave, but that’s truthfully about as close as you’ll get. Yet however hard you look - and some people will be looking hard, assuming they’re willing to chuck any money Gibson’s way (and that’s a decision that should be made independently of this review) - there’s nary a trace of Gibson’s objectionable views in Apocalypto. If the ‘sugartits’ incident had happened before the release of The Passion Of The Christ, which suggested the anti-Semitic sentiment that was to be so publicly vented on July 28, 2006, then it would be relevant to discuss the two together.
This is a review of Apocalypto, not of Mel Gibson of a movie about Mayans and a civilisation on the verge of collapse, not of a drunken rant in Malibu and a reputation forever tainted. Before we plunge into the treacherous undergrowth of the Yucatán, let’s get something out of the way.