Who saw it? What did you think?
The American Papist has a lengthy review
Anthony Lane in the New Yorker:
Apocalypto” is a pathological work of art. It is neither gratuitous nor casual; Gibson is not trying out an idea or testing a visual manner, and the digital cameras used throughout by the director of photography, Dean Semler, yield both a lustre and a pantherish mobility that reach to the guts of the story. That is the thing about Gibson, fool that he is in other ways: he 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. Contrary to what his detractors say, I don’t believe Gibson is roused by violence in itself. What lures him, in his dark remoldings of Catholic iconography, is breakage and restoration—the deeper and more foul the wounds, the more pressing the need to see them healed. Hence the multiple endings of “Apocalypto,” at once overpowering and risible, and hence the blessing that one of the murderous hunters bestows on a friend whose life, cut short by a snakebite to the neck, is quickly draining away: “Travel well.”
It is no accident that this movie was released on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the day before the feast of St. Juan Diego, and days before the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
And they don’t get it. None of the reviewers get it, not even the Catholics. David DiCerto of Catholic News Service doesn’t get it, nor does Anthony Sacramone of "First Things," nor does Greydanus.
Secular critic Josh Larson certainly doesn’t get it when he refers to "the picture’s penultimate shot, a grandiose ‘Planet of the Apes’-style shocker that gives you a case of historical whiplash." He’s talking of the arrival of the Spanish with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Well, I take it back. Julia Guernsey gets it, and is disgusted and angry by it. Oh, she admits that the Maya did brutal things like human sacrifice, and did it in groups, and rolled the bodies down the steps of the pyramids. "But it would probably have been done as a pious act with solemnity," she protests. And we shouldn’t overlook their art and their science and their architecture. "They show some buildings but they don’t talk about them," she complains. No, he shows what they were used for (which she admits is accurate). Perhaps if Gibson were to have people talk about the buildings it might have been in the form of the little girl saying, "See these magnificent buildings? There will not be one stone left lying upon another that will not be thrown down."
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