Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Apocalyptic violence


"The message? The end is near and the savior has come. Gibson's efforts at authenticity of location and language might, for some viewers, mask his blatantly colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess."

Read Tracy Ardren's review at archaelogy.org.


So if Mel Gibson's new genre really is religious slasher flicks, what can we expect next? Something based on the writings of Adam von Bremen, maybe? I suspect that "the enlightened Christian describing the barbaric heathens" would be very much Gibson's thing.


Midvinterblot

2 comments:

SunflowerP said...

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one perceiving this sort of pattern in Gibson's work (I've been tagging it "epics about how nasty other religions are" in my mind). All the buzz is about whether folks will boycott in reaction to the "drunken antiSemite" incident - I'm avoiding this one because of that pattern.

Sunflower

The Oracle said...

I thought some more about what Gibson might get up to next, and I predict a concoction consisting of equal parts Dante and Hieronymus Bosch...