This doesn't happen very often. While I am something of a film geek, and indeed I own more movies than any person has any right to ever own, over the past few years I've found my tastes growing something...jaded. Maybe it's the bitterness of approaching middle-age. Maybe it's from watching too many Rifftrax. Or maybe it's just due to the fact that I've seen waaaaaaaaay too many movies, and any more something has to be pretty extraordinary to actually impress me.
I try to find new favorite movies...I really do. I thought that "300" would be the big movie this year to really blow me away, and while I did indeed find "300" to be one very exciting and finely crafted film, something about it left me a bit let down. Maybe because it delivered what it promised, but nothing more. Maybe my expectations were too high, since it was really the one film released in 2007 that I was looking forward to. Whatever the case, "300" was very good...but not great.
So, lo and behold, it wasn't a 2007 movie at all to make it onto my coveted by somewhat elusive "list", but a leftover from 2006: "Apocalypto," Mel Gibson's adventure epic about a man trying to survive the beginning of the end of the Mayan Empire and save his family in the process.
Mel Gibson may have gone a bit wacko in the past couple of years, with anti-Semitic drunken outbusts, DUIs and verbally abusing film students who ask him too many questions, but DAMN can he make a movie! Apocalypto has visual and emotional resonance. It's a cutionary tale of what happens to a civilizaton that drowns in its own excess, masked in the guise of an adventure story. It's a foreign language art-house film given an action/adventure makeover. And it's one of the most involving, frightening, and exhausting films I've seen in a long, long time.
Apocalypto is well directed, beautifully shot, finely acted and completely exciting from start to finish (especially the extended chase sequence that occupies nearly the entirety of the final 45 minutes of the film). It's also incredibly well-paced -- I was hard pressed to believe that 2 hours and 18 minutes had passed. As a final word of warning, "Apocalypto" is also INCREDIBLY violent. People put off by violent images will find much of the film simply unwatchable...so you've been warned.
But if you have the stomach for it, and if you can get past the "subtitled" hurdle (it's never bothered me, but I know some people have trouble with subtitled films), then I strongly recommend "Apocalypto". Some of us keep hanging on year after year and keep watching out for the next great film, even when so much of what is made these days is just a waste of our time: films like "Apocalypto" are our reward.
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