It’s not uncommon for directors to give themselves a cameo in their films. Alfred Hitchcock (“Psycho”) could be seen for a few seconds in almost all of his works. Peter Jackson also insisted on being in front of the camera for a brief moment during his directing work. These brief appearances often happen so quickly that a blink of an eye is sometimes enough to miss them.
However, Mel Gibson went to extremes – and in a very special way! In the trailer for his ultra-brutal historical thriller “Apocalypto,” the Oscar-winning director can actually only be seen for a split second. So it’s a real challenge to hit pause at the right moment to find Gibson looking at the camera with a bushy beard and big grin.
If you’re up for the challenge, you can’t find the right trailer for Apocalypto in the autoplay above (this is the long trailer). We’ll include the accompanying, shorter trailer after this paragraph. This mini mini performance by Mel Gibson can be found at 1 minute and 46 seconds. But like I said, since this is a quickly edited sequence of images, you could miss Gibson’s shot over and over again:
Of course, since we’re not monsters and we don’t want to leave you sitting on hot coals, we took up the challenge ourselves and took a screenshot of Mel Gibson in the “Apocalypto” trailer. This is what it looks like:
This is “Apocalypto”
In his fourth directorial work, Mel Gibson plays the time of the Mayas, an indigenous people in Central America who lived on the Yucatan Peninsula between 300 AD and 900 AD. The film revolves around the paw of the jaguar (Rudy Youngblood) whose village is invaded. While his heavily pregnant wife manages to escape into a hole in the ground, he is captured along with the majority of the villagers. He must escape to save his wife, but the warlike Holcane shows no mercy.
The official MOVIE STARTS review, which gives the movie 4 stars out of a possible 5, can also confirm that Mel Gibson really hit the ground running with “Apocalypto.” In this case one should not expect historically accurate historical cinema, Instead, Mel Gibson has staged an ultra-brutal, fast-paced action movie that impresses not least with a superbly staged jungle setting.