This analysis of Mel Gibson's superb Apocalypto (2006) will consider how the movie's five plot points create the story's deep structure. These discrete story points include the Inciting Incident in Act 1, Turning Points 1 and 2 in Act 2, and the Crisis Decision and Climax in Act 3. Spoiler alert: this structural analysis will reveal crucial plot moments; you may prefer to read this after viewing the film.
This film's arc describes an inverted parabola, moving down to the most extreme level of loss for the hero, positioned at the precise Midpoint of the story. The film's back story is that the hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), lives on the inland perimeter of the coastal Aztec civilization in Mexico in the late 15th Century. The opening scenes show Jaguar Paw in a hunting party with his age-mates. A scene unfolds of the hunters carving up the largest of three boars they have just brought down, and dividing select parts of the carcass. One of their number is mocked about his impotence by being given the animal's testicles. It is refreshing to see native North Americans portrayed with characteristics that transcend culture and exist in every time and place (humor, kinship bonds, obscenity, deference to authority, etc).
A Hollywood movie's 'Inciting Incident', which occurs usually in the first 1/2 hour, challenges the hero to respond to a new development or opportunity. To achieve that response, the hero must internally expand, irrevocably changing his life. The hero is then thrown into a series of escalating accommodations on his journey to understand and solve the Inciting Incident's original problem. This movie's Inciting Incident occurs after their return, early the next morning when a native slave-trading group attacks the hunters' village. Jaguar Paw, emerging from a dream-premonition of imminent danger, wakes his wife and son and takes them to the perimeter of the village. As the attack escalates behind him, he lowers them by rope into a large well, dry due to the recent drought. Against their appeals, he tells them he will return, and goes back into the village to help repel the invaders. He kills several, and nearly kills the leader's lieutenant, Middle Eye (Gerardo Taracena), who is saved when the leader intervenes, and who will torment Jaguar Paw during the coming trek back to the capital city. The attack winds down; many have been killed, the children are left behind to fend for themselves, and the middle-aged majority are taken prisoner and led away. When Middle Eye learns the identity of Jaguar Paw's father, he executes the father to punish Jaguar Paw. This constitutes the first step down in the story's arc.
Turning Point 1. After a long, torturous trek through the forest and the environs of the city, they arrive in the capital. The royal family is in state, presiding at the sacrifices held to appease the Aztec pantheon of gods, who have brought drought upon the land. The captured people of the forest assume they will be put to work as slaves. Second step down in the arc.
A movie's Midpoint usually provides the story with a coherence and symmetry that the audience feels unconsciously, and for this reason is important structurally. This film's Midpoint sees the middle-aged male captives led up the long stone stairs of the central pyramid. They see at the top that they are to be sacrificed to the gods. One of their number is placed on the altar and sacrificed his heart is removed and burned in a ritual pyre. Scenes of Jaguar Paw's wife and son in the well back in the village are inter-cut throughout the film; she is seen now appealing to sky, speaking to Jaguar Paw, saying "Come back to us!" He can sense her summons, and pushes himself forward to be sacrificed next. He is pulled out, placed on the altar, and the knife is about to descend into his chest. A well-timed solar eclipse occurs, throwing the land into darkness. The head priest nimbly exploits the moment, asking the gods for a sign that they are satisfied with the sacrifices, even as the eclipse wanes and the sun's disc reappears. The priest announces to great acclaim that the gods have drunk their fill, and the rest of the scheduled sacrifices are canceled. This is the bottom of the story arc's parabola, when Jaguar Paw voluntarily embraced death, to 'travel well' to be reunited in the spirit world with this family. The arc now reverses and moves up. Note that native North Americans are not being portrayed in the usual patronizing, dances with wolves leftist fashion, as innocent, pure children in a state of nature, soon to be defined solely, exclusively as victims, the perennial hapless, helpless victims of European imperialism. Gibson is attacking here one of the West's central myths: that the Americas were a secular Eden, a Paradise that suffered conquest by the near-demonic forces of Western, Judeo-Christian civilization. (This ideology is very much still with us. It is the primary reason the left cannot bring itself to identify the most serious current external threat to the West: Islamism.) Gibson's point is that the Americas was a place like any other, with a human population like people anywhere else, with the same range of virtues and faults, struggling to survive in a landscape of war, slavery, and greed.
Turning Point 2. When the priest's slave-dealer instructs the slave-trading leader, Zero Wolf (Raoul Trujillo), that the captives are to be "disposed of", he leads them away from the temple precinct to an open field, with the forest in view in the distance. The captives are released in pairs, told to run, and are to be used as target practice. Jaguar Paw and another are the last to be released, and run in diagonal swings across the open field, avoiding the spears, arrows, and javelins that rain down, until the other in Jaguar Paw's pair is hit, and then Jaguar Paw is also hit, wounded in the side. The other tells Jaguar Paw to run, "Save yourself!" The leader's son runs out to dispatch them; working together with the other captive Jaguar Paw is able to seize hold of the leader's son's knife-hand, reverse the blade and drive it slashing up across the throat of their attacker, who had just dispatched the other captive. The leader's son staggers away, and dies. The slave-trading group are shocked. Zero Wolf, the leader, is enraged, which will rapidly change to an obsessive desire for revenge. They leap into the chase, as Jaguar Paw staggers into the corn field heading for the forest beyond. The story's arc has stepped up, with Jaguar Paw gaining his freedom. But he is now a fugitive being pursued by men utterly bent on his death.
Act 3's Crisis Decision. This comes quite early in the story. After managing to elude his pursuers in the cornfield, and using his hunting skills to strike back in the area beyond, Jaguar Paw stands now before a river and waterfall, with no way back through the pursuers, who appear behind him, just out of range. He decides. Running forward he leaps into the waterfall and falls to the foaming cataract far below. He surfaces, climbs out onto a rock, and shouts defiance at his former captors up on the ridge. The leader receives untimely advice from one of his men, to abandon the chase; the leader's knife lances up into the man's chest, his body shoved carelessly over the side of the precipice. The leader announces they will all jump into the falls. Jaguar Paw, alarmed at seeing them make the leap, turns and runs into the forest. He runs a bit further, then slows, and stops dead. He turns and says aloud, "This is my forest. It is time for them to be the prey." He goes on the attack, luring, taunting, deceiving, trapping, and killing his tormentors, one by one. The story's arc has stepped up another level.
Climax. Torrential rains begin. He kills several more in their band, and also the slave-trading lieutenant who has tormented him throughout this ordeal. Moments later he pretends to be cornered by the leader, allowing him to shoot an arrow into his upper chest, thus luring him forward; the leader crosses a tripwire that brings the knife-studded boar-killing trap swinging round to slam into his chest. Impaled by six long knives, the leader stares into Jaguar Paw's eyes, his obsession undiminished, and dies.
Two more in the slave-trading party remain. Jaguar Paw, slowed down now by two dire wounds, staggers on towards the nearby coast. He comes out on the beach and moves down to the water. The two follow him out onto the sand, knowing they finally have him trapped. Jaguar Paw has stopped, he stares out into the bay. The two behind also stop, and stare. PULL BACK TO REVEAL, from behind the other two, several large ships moored in the bay. Two cutters have been launched, and Spanish conquistadores stand in the bows of the small vessels, looking with interest at their hosts on the shore. Jaguar Paw, seeing his opportunity, turns and lurches back towards the edge of the beach. His former captors ignore him. He escapes into the forest.
Jaguar Paw arrives at the well, now filled by the torrential rains, and rescues his wife and family. A new dawn. Jaguar Paw stands on a ridge with his wife, looking down at the ships in the bay. She asks: "Should we go down to them?" He answers: "I think we should go into the forest, and make a new beginning." This echoes the words of the leader of a group that Jaguar Paw's hunting party met in the forest in the film's opening scene, fleeing one of the many marauding, Aztec, slave-trading bands.
Finally we have a movie that blasts away the deeply patronizing, racist, politically-correct myths perpetrated by the left, of 'natives' as innocents in a state of nature, living in Paradisaical harmony, victimized by the rapacious evil of European invaders. I certainly don't deny that European invaders committed horrific atrocities in what would come to be a near-genocide, yet the left's myths, by humiliating and infantilizing the many nations of the native people of the Americas, have raised an insurmountable barrier to native peoples' adaptation to modernity. This constitutes an ongoing left-inspired ghettoization of native people in all the nations of the Americas.
Gibson's tag-line for the movie was a quote from historian Will Durant:: "A great civilization is not destroyed from without until it has destroyed itself from within." The film rhetorically asks whether the West, via its suicidal ideology of political correctness, is destroying itself from within? In recent years everything in the West has come under siege from within - all of our values, national political institutions, open market economics, democratic states' defense alliances. And we really, for the most part, don't see it. Yet it's happening all around us.
In any event, native American groups applauded this movie. European leftist media predictably condemned and dismissed it as the work of an ideologue. Would that it were so.
