On a five day break from school because we are between terms. I spent from after school Wednesday night, until just now in the early hours of Tuesday morning, writing. Stopping only to eat cake, shower and use the bathroom. I left my apartment only once, and that was to meander over to the gas-station convienance store (dressed in shorts, hooker boots, the scarf of justice and a really large yellow sweater), because we were out of food and I needed cake to survive. The life of a writer. So difficult. So hectic.
I finished the first draft of my feature on Saturday evening and decided to reward my greatness with watching a movie (thinking of it now, that's vaguely ironic). My roommate had been out to his sketch group and one of the other intrepid artists leant him a movie, which I was excited to discover was Mel Gibson's thing, "Apocolypto". So, in the darkness of our livingroom we watched it and it was dreadful.
Okay, not entirely dreadful. As much as my roommate complained about the shoddy cinematics and bizarre directorial shots, I rather liked them. And the characters has neat tatoos and it was supposed to be a Mayan culture, so it was a bit interesting. But, from a writer's point of veiw, I'd rather stick two fingers down my throat than have to watch it again. If Gibson tried to pass that script through a writing class, he'd get his knuckles rapt. Honestly.
It starts out focusing on this hefty character, who's getting made fun of by his peers because he's unable to father a child (shooting blanks, as it were). And this is the main story for the first 15-20 minutes, along with this thing that happens when a village's worth of people walk through the area and say that they were ravaged. You can immediately point that out as the inciting incident. And this is all well and good, until - ultimately - the main character's village is attacked and burned (essentially ravaged) by the bad guys.
The entire "shooting blanks" plotline is ditched, then and there. Also, that hefty guy you came to sort-of root for, as a village underdog? Apparently he's not even the main character. He just sits about for a few minutes blubbering about how life isn't fair and he wishes he could die, and, from then on, he plays no role in the movie at all! OH WAIT, but there's MORE!
Apparently the main character is this fellow called Jaguar Paw. The switch wouldn't be so bad, except that this guy is the main tormentor of the hefty guy, so any sympathy that we could have mustered for this character has flown out the window, twenty minutes ago. But WAIT! There's MORE!
They have all the prisoners from JP's village out in a line of this field, and they're killing them, one by one. But then (after taking an arrow in the chest) JP survives and manages to get away! Out-running all of the perfectly fit, uninjured people chasing after him. And they NEVER go back to show us what happened to the other prisoners who had been sentenced to die - one of them being the hefty guy that I sort-of cared about!
And I'm not even going to go into the whole, "Ending the film with the arrival of the British tall-ships". Despite, y'know. It was the MAYAN CULTURE and in the real world, the Brit's never showed up the shores and met up with the Mayans. To quote Dylan Moran as Bernard Black from "Black Books"::
"Don't make me get sick into my own scorn!"
So if you can look past the bizarre directing, un-fullfilling storyline, and all the little things that you could never believe (Taking an arrow to the chest only to rip it out, get up and start running again for miles and miles, then another arrow and still running for miles... falling and hanging by your neck on a rope over a cliff and not dying...etc), then it's not a half-bad film.
Ha! Mel Gibson?
EPIC FAIL.
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