Old world.

SAY what you will about Mel Gibson--and whatever you want to say, it's probably been said a few hundred times already--but he knows why people go to movie theaters. Apocalypto, his weird, wild, subtitled sojourn in the world of the late-medieval Maya, probably isn't to everyone's taste, but it's the work of a filmmaker who understands exactly how to use a moving image to dazzle your eye and pin you to your seat. If you'd rather watch something more sophisticated, more verbal, more civilized, then God bless you--that's why we've got DVD players, microwave popcorn, and the collected works of Woody Allen. But if you're interested in the kind of story best told on a wall-sized screen--and you aren't put off by a little human sacrifice and the occasional man-eating cat--then this just might be the Christmas film for you.

Apocalypto is a story of exile and return, of paradise lost and found again, compressed into four difficult days in the life of Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood, part of a cast of unknowns), a young man from a hunter-gatherer tribe who is captured by a raiding party and dragged away, along with most of his village, to the capital city of the fading Mayan imperium. In Jaguar Paw's rainforest, life is good: A benign primitivism holds sway, a crunchy-conservative round of hunting and feasting, cheerful paganism and earthy monogamy. In the metropolis, meanwhile, civilization has rotted on the vine: There is famine and pestilence, deforestation and pollution, and the local elites have learned a trick or two from their Aztec neighbors and taken up human sacrifice to keep the masses happy.

Apocalypto is prefaced with a quote from Will Durant about a great civilization's decline, and so you expect the film to linger with the mobs and ziggurats, the corrupt priests and the blue-painted sacrifices. But Gibson has something else in mind. Life in the decaying empire is sketched in a few memorable strokes--the slave markets and costumed women; the heads bouncing down the temple stairs; the high priest's crowd-pleasing shtick, part Robespierre and part Jimmy Swaggart. But then Jaguar Paw slips out of captivity and heads back to the forest, with a pack of warriors hard on his heels, and Apocalypto gives up social commentary for the thrill of the chase.

If you're looking for subtlety or anthropological detail, in other words, you've picked the wrong crazy Mesoamerican blockbuster. Apocalypto is a Biblical epic crossed with an action flick, more interested in dramatizing a set of primal binaries--purity and decadence, fear and heroism, Eden and the Fall--than in exploring the complexities of pre-Columbian civilization. Or any complexities at all, for that matter. Gibson's narrative deals in archetypes: the periphery versus the empire, authentic religion versus perverted faith, the state of nature versus the chains of civilization. Jaguar Paw is the thousand-faced Hero, alternately channeling Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas; his wife, hidden in a quarry during the initial raid and then trapped there, awaiting her husband's promised return, is the archetype of Woman, complete with one child on her lap and another in her womb. The Mayan world around them overflows with vivid detail, but Gibson uses it primarily as a colorful backdrop to the most stripped-down, linear plot imaginable, a story that flashes by--though the movie is more than two hours long--with an almost vicious speed.

There are plenty of mistakes and missed opportunities along the way--moments when you wish the script had paused to explain a few more details (like, say, how Jaguar Paw's tribe managed to exist in blissful ignorance of the teeming, powerful empire just two days' journey from their village), and scenes where Gibson's showman's touch reaches well over the top. (I could have done without the plague-raddled seer child, in particular, whose tedious prophesying more or less maps out the movie's second half.) As Apocalypto rushes to an end, the urgency of the chase can't quite mask the feeling that a better, broader film may have slipped away--although the movie's final twist does manage to open the story out again, suggesting a wider canvas and a larger tragedy.

It suggests, too, a spiritual and artistic kinship between Apocalypto and last winter's brilliant and idiosyncratic portrait of the America that was, Terrence Malick's The New World. The two films have the same preoccupations, though they take them up in different ways, like funhouse mirrors held up to each other's visions: Gibson emphasizes collision, Malick reconciliation; Gibson is frenzied where Malick is ecstatic; rigorous where his counterpart remains resolutely vague; and (of course) he's savagely violent where Malick is dreamy and pastoral.

It's this bloodshed that has provided Gibson's critics with their principal ammunition this time around--there being no Jewish characters in Apocalypto, mercifully, and no Mayan version of the Jesus Seminar for him to be accused of having failed to adequately honor. The violence is certainly real, and comprehensive--a long series of impalements, decapitations, and disembowelments, with the occasional panther attack thrown in for good measure. This is not a movie for children, to say the least, and those who take their films PG-13 or tamer will find about as many reasons as there are corpses stacked around the Mayan pyramids to join the host of critics damning Gibson as a sadist, the embodiment of the very cultural decline Apocalypto pretends to fret over.

If all cinematic violence is to be condemned, then this seems fair enough, but I hope that those who turn away in disgust from Gibson's film will likewise disavow the carnage on display in recent war movies (from Saving Private Ryan to this fall's Flags of Our Fathers) and prestige television shows (The Sopranos, for instance, or Deadwood)--not to mention the arch, meaningless mayhem of Quentin Tarantino and his imitators, and of course the constant run of slasher-movie gore, from Saw to Hostel. Otherwise, it might seem to the untrained spectator that wanton violence does pass critical muster these days, and can even earn you approbation, but only as long as it's kept safely senseless or carefully ironic. It might seem, as well, that Gibson is being singled out for condemnation because his movies dare to place their violence in a moral and metaphysical context, and suggest that even agony and death might have a larger meaning, whether for Jaguar Paw or Jesus Christ.

But that's not possible, of course. Why, you might as well suggest that America's critics have something against, say, Christianity.