Apocalypto: Critic Reviews

Never let it be said that Gibson the director (he also co-wrote the script with former assistant Farhad Safinia) doesn't know how to pace and build action like a pro.

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is, above all, a muscular and kinetic action movie, a drama of rescue and revenge with very little organic relation to its historical setting.

Pathologically brilliant. It is bizarre, stomach-turningly violent and frequently inspired.

Perhaps Gibson is trying to shock us into absorbing the torment and severity of man's inhumanity to man. The tragedy is that the film has the opposite effect: As we are bombarded by savagery, we become inured to it.

Gibson may not be much of a deep thinker, but he's a heck of a storyteller.

Mel Gibson may be a lunatic, but he's our lunatic, and while I wouldn't wish him behind the wheel of a car after happy hour or at a B'nai Brith function anytime, behind a camera is another matter.

Apocalypto is unburdened by nationalist or religious piety -- it's pure, amoral sensationalism.

An Oscar would not be forgiveness; it would be blindness.

By the end I felt sure it was the most obsessively, graphically violent film I'd ever seen, but equally sure that Apocalypto is a visionary work with its own wild integrity. And absolutely, positively convinced that seeing it once is enough.

It is Mel Gibson's latest proof that as a director, his ambition is boundless and his energy nearly so, but his judgment is sorely lacking.

For all the film's beauty and mythic grandeur, it's the fetishistic fascination with gore that stays in your head and distracts from almost everything else the movie tries to do.

Apocalypto wants us to believe there is an overpowering darkness in the land, while I can't quite get past a suspicion of overpowering darkness in the filmmaker.

Apocalypto demonstrates two things: that Mel Gibson is a hell of a filmmaker and that his imaginative world borders on the Neanderthal.

[Gibson] has learned how to tell a tale, and to raise a pulse in the telling. You have to admire that basic gift, uncommon as it is in Hollywood these days, though equally you have to ask what obsessions goad it on.

Filming in the state of Veracruz and on the Yucatan Peninsula, Gibson and his production team transport viewers six centuries back in time to create an amazing 'you are there' effect.

Gibson's interest in human cruelty and human suffering does not make him unique among filmmakers. His preferred mixture of piety and viciousness, however, makes him uniquely suited to our post-Cecil B. DeMille age of cinematic mythmaking.

The production design is superb, and the actors deliver their dialogue in subtitled Yucatecan Maya, but despite all the anthropological drag, this is really just a crackerjack Saturday-afternoon serial.

Apocalypto is primal.

There's a savage magnificence to Apocalypto, with visuals worthy of Fellini or David Lynch, and the kind of relentless excitement that only a few filmmakers can deliver.

This is a chase movie with a fancy set-up, that's all.

Although it's a pretty good bet that much of the audience won't be beguiled by Gibson's end-of-the-world metaphors, no one can deny he made an entertaining movie.

Blood pours from every orifice in what looks like a terrible waste of Smucker's raspberry sauce.

Mel Gibson is always good for a surprise, and his latest is that Apocalypto is a remarkable film.

Forget your history lessons about what an advanced civilization the Mayans were. Here they're bloodthirsty savages.

Mel Gibson's Apocalypto passes the only movie test that's important. It's the 'I'd pay to see that' test.