Needless to say, "Revelation" is a good-looking film. The film’s narrative is smooth, and the structure is clearly structured. It uses the vision and psychological feelings of the protagonist's tiger claws to naturally connect different scenes and different plot paragraphs, and the shots are quite visually impactful, especially in the killing and escape paragraphs, which often makes the audience shocking. In addition, the film uses parallel montage techniques to make the escape of the tiger's claw and his wife and children's escape from the dry well develop in parallel. Although Hollywood’s tried-and-tested “last-minute rescue” model allows us to know a priori that this family will succeed in escape, the whole process-especially the pregnant women who are about to give birth and the children who are unable to restrain their hands are trapped. The plot setting of the dry well still greatly increased the suspense of the film.
However, I don't want to "recommend" the film because of this. Because the above advantages are all focused on the escape story of tiger claws, there is no involvement of the Mayan civilization background carefully set by the film, and this background basically does not have a substantial impact on the escape story-except for enriching the means of killing. Furthermore, I even feel that Mel Gibson is just using the mystery of Maya civilization in people’s hearts to package a very popular story, associating his "Brave Heart" and "The Passion of the Christ", which seems to be his usual style.
But this time he seems to have gone further. In order to cover up the flaws in the escape story, he used an inexplicable prediction to induce the audience to focus more on thinking about the rise and fall of civilization, colonization and other grand historical issues, thereby neglecting them. A series of coincidences in the escape process (a solar eclipse when they are about to be killed, tigers, snakes, and swamps in the escape, and the arrival of the colonial fleet when they escape to the sea) are extremely obvious artificial axe traces, ignoring the survivors The bridge sections such as jumping waterfalls are too old-fashioned, ignoring the obvious piercing-how can a mechanism set up for hunting beasts be centered on the chest of a person walking upright. At the same time, he presents the ancient Mayan civilization to the audience as an alien spectacle, and particularly amplifies the cruelty and ignorance in it, as an important weight for the film to win the box office.
What’s more noteworthy is that the film uses the name "Apocalypto". According to reports, this is a Greek word meaning "new beginning", but it is translated into "Apocalyptic" or "Apocalyptic" in English. "Apocalypse." Therefore, Chinese audiences will pay great attention to the prophecies and revelatory dialogues in the film from the beginning to the end according to the "revelation" of the title, and try to decipher the "connotation" of the film, thus falling deeper into it. Mel Gibson's trap.
According to my understanding, what the film tells is just an old-fashioned escape story. In addition to a series of coincidences, the protagonist, Tiger Claw, was able to escape because of two reasons that inspired him to strive for survival. One is imaginary. ——Father told him "Fear is a disease; once it is conquered, it will reside in your soul." The other is real-rescue your wife and children. In this way, is the film popular enough?
I have been a teacher in the past, and I have always been lenient when evaluating students. I will never give "good" to those who are "good". However, for a Hollywood movie that has nothing to do with myself, I don't think I need to be soft-hearted, so in the end, I chose "OK".
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