Today's Hollywood action blockbusters mostly contain three essential elements.
One is international superstars with box office appeal, such as Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans and Dawn Johnson;
The second is to ensure realistic visual effects to shock the audience with grand scenes, especially the Marvel Universe movies;
The third is the series IP that has created box office success, such as the "Godzilla" series, the "Jurassic Park" series, and the "Fast and Furious" series.
However, the 2006 film "Revelation", directed by Mel Gibson, does not follow this creative law, and is also a large-scale production film, without any well-known actors, rarely appearing in special effects scenes, and a story focusing on the Mayan civilization of the 16th century. But it doesn't stop it from becoming a classic.
Douban 8.6 points, better than 97% of action movies, unique shooting methods, unprecedented Mayan stories, so that "Revelation" can still afford "an immersive no urine point" of the amazing action movie.
The story begins in a tropical rainforest in Central America.
The male protagonist, the Indian Tiger Claw, has been hunting with his father in the forest since he was a child, and the small tribe he is in, although the conditions are simple, there is no lack of warm atmosphere of laughter.
Sometimes, a group of young and vigorous men will casually ridicule another companion who has not had children for a long time, and joke with this companion as a daily pleasure by swallowing the testicles of the tapir or applying peppers to the lower body.
But more often than not, members of the tribe snuggled up to each other, gathered in front of the night campfire, and listened to the elders of the tribe tell some philosophical fables.
The change in the fate of the tiger's claw and its tribe begins with a hunt.
When tiger claws were about to share the tapir meat and carry it back to the tribe, they suddenly saw another group of Indian tribes, looking at themselves and their companions with fear. It turned out that the latter had just been robbed and invaded by other predators, and they were all extremely embarrassed and sad.
But Tiger Claw's father, Flint Stone Heaven, did not be vigilant about this and led everyone to flee the village, but let Tiger Claw let go of his fear and continue to live in peace.
However, early the next morning, the tiger's claw woke up in a nightmare and immediately witnessed the sudden attack of the invaders. After some resistance, Tiger Claw hid his wife who was about to give birth in an underground pit, but he and other members of the tribe were captured and escorted far away.
Along the way, Tiger Claw witnessed crop failures brought about by drought, and saw that the plague had nearly wiped out entire villages, and of course, the biggest shock was the homeland of the invaders: the Mayan city-state.
Here, there are poor and extravagant women and upper nobility, as well as poor people and slaves who are starving everywhere; there is the grandeur of the pyramids, and there is the unruly and ugly structure of wooden branches and bamboo strips.
Tiger claws, which have always lived by the water in the forest and hunted for a living, felt that they had entered the outer paradise after seeing all this, and at the same time felt that they had fallen into hopeless purgatory. In fact, all that awaited him was the heart, the severed head, and death.
Due to the increasing drought, the kings and wizards of the Mayan city-state set up a sacrificial platform on the pyramid platform, and the adult male slaves who had been taken from all directions were dragged to the sacrificial platform one by one to take out the beating hearts alive, and then cut off their heads, threw down the pyramids, and finally rolled the corpses down.
When the shaman sacrificed tens of thousands of people and could not cover the scorching sun, but when the tiger's claw was on the sacrificial platform, an annular eclipse appeared in the sky. The people under the pyramid were horrified, and the wizard immediately announced that the sun god had eaten enough of the living tribute. The Tiger Claw thus luckily escaped the disaster temporarily.
But then the wizard asked the leader of the invaders to deal with tiger claws and their companions privately. Just as the leader of the invaders hunted and shot the tiger's claws with a playful mentality, the tiger claws escaped and killed the son of the aggressor's leader.
A long hunt for the tiger's claws alone began.
The tiger claw, on the other hand, retaliated against the invaders who had originally killed its tribesmen one by one, and finally rescued his wife and children who were almost drowned by the rainstorm, and the family fled into the deep forest.
The film ends with the appearance of Spanish army ships and Christian priests, a moment of great historical significance that tells us that this year should be 1519, and in the centuries that followed, Spain slaughtered Indians and plundered goods as a new colony.
However, before the Spanish appeared, we didn't have too many likes and dislikes about the Indians or Mayan city-states in the film. The reason is that director Gibson is extremely restrained, he just looks up at this unique culture from an anthropological perspective.
In the opening part, the invasion of the Indians in the forest by Mayan invaders is nothing more than an inevitable and common tribal conflict in the cracks of history. It's just that because we are preconceived and see the world from the perspective of a tiger's claw, we naturally worry about the danger of our wives and the murder of our father.
But when the film captures the Mayan city-states in great detail, carefully observing the individuals of each class, we will only be fascinated by this civilization. It's like watching "Sidek Balai" and being curious about the life of the Sidek people.
When we finally see the Spaniards finally land and perceive that the two civilizations are beginning to collide fiercely, a sense of sadness and reflection suddenly comes to mind.
For the story of a single civilization is only a narrative art; and the clash of two civilizations is the art of criticism. The former will only provide innocuous curiosity texts, while the latter will generate reflections on a historical level.
Just as we can follow the Qing Dynasty palace fighting drama or the historical drama, we cannot be normal in the face of the film and television dramas about the Opium War and the Battle of Jiawu.
Gibson's last stroke in "Revelation" opens up all the previous story lines of the film. It turns out that the so-called "revelation" is not only aimed at the protagonist of the tiger's claw, but also refers to the demise of the Mayan civilization.
When the little girl with the plague uttered that prophecy, we thought it was only a hint of revenge on the invaders by the tiger's claws:
The holy moment is coming, watch out for the darkness of that day! The man who is worried about bringing the tiger, he will be reborn in the mud, and the person he will introduce to you will be able to wipe out the sky, and he can also bulldoze the earth, bulldoze all of you, end your world, and he is already here at this moment. Day will turn into night, and the tigers will lead you to destruction.
In the second half of the plot, the tiger's claw first hits by mistake, leading the panther to the invaders, and then falls into the mud and awakens to take revenge. In short, every step of the tiger's claw escape is in line with the little girl's prophecy, so that the invaders can be punished one by one.
However, the real intention of this prophecy was the destruction of the Mayan civilization by the Spaniards and the massacre of the Indians.
Here, Mel Gibson, like David Griffiths in "The Party Fights Against the Odds" a hundred years ago, recreates the ancient Babylonian civilization with a huge pen, and he also allows the fierce internal contradictions in the Maya civilization to be presented.
At great cost, countless slaves painted their buildings with lime, but on the basis of aesthetic and religious considerations; they invaded Indian tribes everywhere, using living people as sacrifices, and beheading their heads, only because they were superstitious about worshiping gods and begging for rain.
In contrast, the Western civilization represented by Spain, scientific, military, economic and social changes, all of which gave it the advantage of crushing the Mayan civilization.
Is Gibson risking the world to overturn the history of the massacre and aggression of the Spanish predators? No, he has always touched the bloody and cruel moments of history with a reflective posture.
"Braveheart", featuring William Wallace, a famous national hero in Scottish history, tells the story of his lifelong battle and final tragic death.
"The Passion of the Christ" directly approaches the last journey of Jesus' life, the crucifixion, which records the whole process of Jesus carrying the crown of thorns, being whipped with a leather whip, dragging a heavy cross, piercing the palms and feet of his hands and feet with iron nails, and being poisoned by the scorching sun.
Some say Gibson is a director of cruelty, or more precisely, exploitation of physical pain. Indeed, even his most recent film, "Hacksaw Ridge" in 2016, although the theme is quite the main theme, is still to let a medical soldier who does not kill the enemy, but only saves his comrades-in-arms, soothe the cruel wound.
When the bloody and cruel large-scale picture becomes the most direct object of expression under the lens, it has a new meaning, that is, the price, symbolism and essence of blood. For the film "Revelation", whether it is a living body or a black panther biting the face, it is a hypothetical of that barbaric era, a metaphor for the decline of civilization.
Leaving aside these deep cores, Gibson's exploration of the genre of chasing action movies makes "Revelation" worth watching. In the process of tiger claws being chased by invaders continuously, we seem to see the unique atmosphere of car chase action movies.
Running feet are like wheels; invaders tracking apart are like sports cars of all kinds; tropical woods, grass, mud and waterfalls correspond to different tracks and environments in the chase; black panthers bite faces, honeycombs hit the invaders, rocks under waterfalls, flying needles coated with venom, which can be seen as crashes, grenades, flying cars and bullets.
These are actually gibson's innovations before the film was made. But compared with the vulgar car chase films, the more than 20 minutes of running and chasing scenes in "Revelation" have unprecedented new ideas.
However, this film has a good performance at the core, theme and genre level, and at present, there are only nearly 70,000 logo evaluations on Douban, which is a pity. After all, in today's Hollywood movie environment, such films may never be seen again.
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tang Si
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