Perhaps it’s a bit late to say anything new about Apocalypto, since it’s been out in the States for a good long while now, and has received more than its fair share of criticism. Gibson’s tale of Mayan civilisation on the verge of destruction, and of one young hunter’s quest to save his family, has provoked about the fiercest love / hate reaction since … well, since The Passion of the Christ. Depending on who and what you read, it’s either a masterpiece or a gratuitous, badly-directed, historically preposterous monstrosity.

My personal feelings veer more towards “masterpiece”, though with a handful of reservations. In its first two-thirds, Apocalypto displays the kind of mad grandeur that you’d normally associate with a director like Werner Herzog. In fact, Herzog is a good (if obvious) point of comparison, and Gibson’s latest evokes strong memories of Aguirre, the Wrath of God and, to a lesser extent, of Fitzcarraldo. It has the same sense of madness bubbling under the surface, the same audacity – say what you like about Gibson, but what other western director would make a film in Yukatek Maya, a language alien to a good ninety-nine percent of his audience? And, through this and other means, Apocalypto creates an astonishing sense of authenticity – not necessarily historical authenticity, but of a consistent world that feels real down to its most minute detail. The costumes, sets, acting and photography are all faultless in their evocation of a culture that most people have not the faintest experience of – and yet, in its headlong rush towards self-destruction, feels uncomfortably familiar.

What’s particularly interesting, in retrospect, is that so many critics have accused Gibson of sadism – not just of having made a sadistic film but of being, as a human being, sadistic. It’s a hell of a charge to throw at anyone, let alone to make of an artist based solely on the evidence of their artistic work. It’s certainly true that Gibson’s approach to representing violence is fairly unrestrained. In fact, he shows everything, in excruciating detail – impaling, evisceration, beheading, just about every form of bodily mutilation you could care to imagine.

But there are few horror-movie-style vicarious thrills here. Gibson makes us watch, even when we’d rather not. It would be difficult to walk away from Apocalypto and not think about the horrors you’ve witnessed – as you can from, say, the average dumb action movie, or indeed the average televised war report. The violence in Apocalypto certainly makes for hard watching, just as it did in The Passion of the Christ; it’s unrelenting, exhausting and frequently stomach-churning. It probably isn’t necessary to the furthering of the plot. But, whether it’s necessary or not, it at least rings true, or truer at least than the sanitized images that most director’s trade in. And that aside, what seems to have passed an awful lot of critics by is that Apocalypto may be astonishingly violent, but it’s also a film about violence – about pain and trauma on a level ranging from the individual to the societal.

Still, the amount of blood and guts on display is inevitably going to be a turn off for some people. And going back to the aforementioned reservations, so is the change in direction of the last third – wherein Apocalypto turns into a fun but unnecessarily drawn out recreation of Predator. It just about works, despite some ridiculous histrionics with the hero’s imperilled wife and kids, but it doesn’t match up to what’s come before – which, whatever its ideological flaws may be, is fascinating and provocative filmmaking of a standard that few directors today have the bravery, the funds or the sheer insanity to match.