To keep my mind off the storm, I watched Mel Gibson’s film “Apocalypto” the other night.
It’s an entertaining film, although historically inaccurate, but what struck me the most is the constancy of Mel’s thematic obsession with the superhero.
In the film, a young man with a wife and child is captured and almost becomes a human sacrifice. He escapes, getting lanced in the process, and in spite of his weakened condition, manages to outrun a jaguar, leap down a fifty foot waterfall and kill off his multiple pursuers one by one, even though he’s unarmed.
One of his devices is to make poison darts on the fly from thorns, a frog and a rolled up leaf for a blower.
His pregnant wife is no less heroic. Having been lowered by our hero to safety in a deep well-like cave, she and her little boy find themselves inundated to the point of drowning when a rainstorm starts to fill the cave. While she’s treading water and keeping her son afloat, she manages to give birth. This is after she uses a makeshift club to kill a wild animal that fell into the cave.
The hero and his family are reunited, the bad guys are defeated and the conquistadors land. Now, can you ask for more than that?