A good movie with a very "Human" moral...

This is more of a response to some of the reviews I've read, and a defense of Mel Gibson, than a review in itself. Still, it promotes seeing the movie, therefore I feel it deserves a place among reviews...

Now look, I know most of you don't like to be "labeled" as "liberals" now-a-days, as conservatives have succeeded in recent years in making it a "dirty" word, but I don't consider it labeling. Referring to you that way is simply calling it like it is. So for those of you libs who aren't ashamed of whom you are, good for you and no apologies, but for those of you who are (stand up for yourself already!), this is for you too.

Let me just say, I love the way a guy produces one film (a good one by the way, which follows accurately the manuscript on which it is based) appealing to a Christian audience and all of you so-called liberals and progressives "can't stand him" or refuse to watch one of his subsequent projects. I wonder if you were all (especially those of you who are women) dancing to the same tune when movies like Forever Young, Hamlet, or Bird on a Wire were at the box office.

I really don't feel that this movie, Apocalypto, has very much of a political undertone at all. You are all just looking too deeply into it because of Mel Gibson's reputation after making The Passion. Everyone assumes, now, that all of his movies are politically driven.

When Martin Scorsese made The Last Temptation of Christ (a movie universally more offensive than either The Passion or Apocalypto) it was praised and forgotten. No one assumed that all of his following works were anti-Religious or anti-Conservative as they do, conversely, with Mel Gibson. In one of the comments I've read, someone wrote to the effect that, 'at the end of the film the good guys come in and kill all the bad guys' (that may not be an exact quote) and that the hero, Jaguar Paw, was 'saved' by the conquistadors; there is no way this conclusion could be drawn from the details of the film, but only from the PREDISPOSITION that Gibson is going to favor the white oppressors.

Apocalypto was simply a good movie about a small group of people from a Central American civilization, just prior to the invasion of the Eastern world. The fact that some of you assume that it was portraying these people as savage, clearly displays the inherent contradictory philosophy of liberalism. While claiming to be the open-minded side of the social spectrum and branding the political right as racists, you are the ones who perceive native Central Americans of centuries past as being savage. To me, they were portrayed as a small community of humans surviving off the provisons of the jungle they lived in. While it may be considered archaic or primitive, I wouldn't call it savage. There was a small community living peacefully, who was attacked and pillaged by a central governmental entity. (How this could be considered anything but politically left, I just don't see, but I digress) Whether Gibson had mistakes with the distinction between Aztecs and Mayans I don't know-I am not an archaeologist-but that is not the point of the film. The point is that there are atrocities that happen in HUMAN culture, and that concepts such as family, friendship, and the will to live are important values that stretch across the entire HUMAN spectrum.

Apocalypto was a good film, whatever your bias is toward Mel Gibson, Christianity, or the political right. It was a film about the human spirit, and the drive to do whatever it takes to survive and to protect that which is important to you.

I recommend that you watch it with an open mind, without any predilections to an ideology, and with the goal of being entertained on a purely human level.

Sidenote/Warning:

If you are a stickler for historical exactness in Hollywood films: this one has been questioned by some reviewers. I personally haven't had the time to research enough to attest to the accuracy of its finer details; then again, I really liked The Godfather as well, but I can't verify whether the Corleone family was an ingenuous portrayal of the Mafia.