That wild-eyed look Gibson displays as Riggs is actually one he reveals quite often in real life, as anyone who has seen a television interview with him can attest, and it's one that he exhibits in a photo of himself with a few men from his Apocalypto cast that was included in a "teaser" trailer released some months ago. While watching Gibson's new film, Apocalypto, it was difficult to keep that image, coupled with Gibson's recent public notoriety, out of my mind. Gibson's wild-eyed look in this scene is one that spawned three sequels and launched a chapter in his career. The image that has stuck with me comes from a scene in the first film of the Lethal series when, confronting a pair of crooks, Gibson's Riggs plays "Three Stooges" with himself to throw them off guard, thus allowing him to poke them in the eyes and ultimately subdue them. The confidence of Wayne, Eastwood, and Bronson is intact, but the stoic sense of control is replaced by a new element of, for lack of a better term, lunacy. Gibson's Martin Riggs is the more accurate embodiment of a contemporary cowboy: like Wayne's outlaw who was a soldier (in the Confederate army, of course) and who uses his knowledge of Comanche ways to trail them, Riggs is the loose cannon-a suicidal near-criminal who's actually a cop and who knows the criminals' game better than they do. Certainly the title character in the Mad Max films displayed a similar bravado and confidence mixed with a stoic, deadpan humor that bears a resemblance to Ethan Edwards's snipe of "That'll be the day!" But it was actually the Lethal Weapon series that first came to mind. But just the fact that people will have a choice, the world will have a choice to listen to the whole film in Comanche is amazing.By coincidence, in a conversation earlier this year I was arguing that the 1970s descendants of John Wayne's swagger and renegade manner in The Searchers were either Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson, but that in the 1980s, instead of someone like Harrison Ford (whose characters, especially Indiana Jones, often register signs of humility) and amongst other candidates like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone, it might have been Mel Gibson. "That's really important to me being Comanche and working with our Comanche language department, also with working with Comanche language speakers. So that not only inspires the young language speakers of my nation, but that inspires a lot of other people and shows them, and like I said, shows the world what our language is about. But this is the first time for a brand new film to come out and have that option to hear it all in the whole language. I think 'Star Wars,' which was 30 years old when they transcribed it into Navajo, and then there was Navajo again for 'Finding Nemo,' which was 20 years old when they did that. "That's never been done for my tribe, ever. Producer Jhane Myers (Member of the Comanche Nation): "But what Jhane is speaking to is on Hulu, there will be a Comanche dub of the movie, so you can watch the entire movie in Comanche with the original actors returning to perform their roles." "Both languages are spoken, but when you hear English, it's as if it's Comanche," he said. He said they never quite came up with a way to make that work, so instead, the film was shot in English and Comanche. ![]() ![]() Trachtenberg clarified and emphasized, saying the creative team did struggle with what he called the "'Hunt For Red October' thing," where the characters speak Russian before transitioning into English. To clear up confusion, it was shot in both languages with the actors performing in English and Comanche:
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