Posted by
Emmett of the Unblinking Eye on Thursday, December 14, 2006 5:45:28 PM
I reviewed both
Apocalypto and
Blood Diamond on the Hewitt Show last week. The first is an outstanding directorial effort (even if the story is a little weak) and may be Mel Gibson's best work to date. It is one of the few movies that actually
moves, and although it's long, you really never notice because the costumes, scenery and cinematography, and his depiction of late Mayan culture, are so spectacular. Blood Diamond, on the other hand, boasts an all-star (if not necessarily "better") cast (
Leonardo DiCaprio,
Djimon Hounsou, and Jennifer Connolly), and certainly has a more contemporary subject matter (civil war and diamonds in Sierra Leone in 1999). But the movie is a little preachy, a little long, and even the excellent work of the leads can't bring the movie together.
But what bothers me is the different way the main stream media views the "gore" quotient in each film, If you do a simple
Google search on "Apocalypto:", "review" and "gore" -- excluding that pesky Al and his diatribe, An Inconvenient Truth -- you wind up with about 189,000 hits. However, if you run the
same search substituting Blood Diamond for Apocalypto, you get a comparatively-measly 41,600 hits. And when you compare the two movies, it baffles me as to why that would be.
There is no question that both films are bloody. Apocalypto features a village raid, a throat slitting, human sacrifices (not detailed, but still...), and particularly-startling arrow-through-the-neck-and-mouth-scene. But the actual body count is relatively small. Blood Diamond, on the other hand, has a much higher body count and much more graphic violence committed by, and to, much younger people. Personally, I find an eight year old with an AK47 a lot more creepy than a Mayan with an obsidian knife.
So why is gore so emphasized in the reviews of Apocalypto, and relatively ignored with Blood Diamond? Two reasons:
First, the violence in Apocalypto is much more personal. Most of it is one-on-one, hand-to-hand battles, and even the use of spears and arrows doesn't minimize the personal nature of the bloodshed. Most of the violence in Blood Diamond is from a distance (albeit a short distance) using comparatively impersonal guns, rifles, automatic weapons and helicopters. The impersonal nature of the violence in Blood Diamond minimizes its impact, and its influence on the viewer.
And the second, of course, is Mel Gibson. At the screening I attended at the
Dodge College of Film and Media Arts at Chapman University, the professor who introduced the film noted that it had tremendous Oscar
® buzz. And my first thought was, "in your dreams". Gibson could have made the best movie since
Citizen Kane and he wouldn't get nominated for Best Picture or Best Director because of his "anti-Semitic" outburst earlier this year. He has apologized profusely for his intemperate statements, and has been forgiven by no one. Even though his comments were outrageous, his actions (at least as far as I can figure out) are not. He doesn't avoid minorities in his projects (Apocalypto, with a 99% minority cast, is a prime example), and he doesn't spew whatever racial or ethnic views he may "secretly" harbor on the screen. And after all, isn't it what we do that trumps what we say? Or isn't that the way it should be?