The billing “most anticipated film of the year” is overused to the point of inanity. And yet, when applied to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, it is wholly appropriate. For the provocative actor-director has spent two gruelling years making this tale from the Mayan civilisation, complete with epic jungle shoots, natural disasters, obscure dialects and ominous philosophical overtones.

During this time, Gibson has seen his controversial The Passion of the Christ become the most successful R-rated movie made, his standing in Hollywood wavering in the process from religious obscurantist to box-office golden boy and back again — thanks to an arrest for drink-driving that culminated in a much-publicised anti-Semitic rant. He’s been into rehab, issued apologies, and been over the media coals. Will it be enough to win Apocalypto (out in the US this week, in the UK next month) a reprieve at the court of public opinion?

The movie is set in the 16th century and tells the story of a heroic family man, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), kidnapped from his village and taken to the big city for human sacrifice. He escapes, and his helter-skelter pursuit by the savage Holcane mercenaries forms the backbone of a movie that Gibson calls “a high-velocity action adventure chase film that keeps on turning the screws”.

Apocalypto was co-written and co-produced by the Hollywood novice Farhad Safinia. The 31-year-old Cambridge graduate was working on the marketing campaign for Gibson’s Passion when he began what he describes as “a series of conversations” with Gibson about making a chase movie set during the Mayan era. “I had travelled to the Mayan lands during university, so I told him a few things about them, and we talked about what we liked in chase movies. And, you know, there are just places and times when you click.”

Safinia soon found himself in the humid rain forests of Catemaco in Mexico for eight exhausting months of weather-plagued shooting. “We were outdoors the whole time, and there was a lot of rain. We had high winds, trees falling — one enormous evergreen came crashing into our village set and a lot of workers were lucky to get out of the way. On the set in Veracruz we had problems with heat exhaustion and dehydration. One of the camera crew put a thermometer out on the ground and the thing just broke at 137 degrees.”

The film is currently in the final throes of sound and colour mixing. A rough cut was recently shown to select audiences, to some acclaim (www.aintitcool.com/node/30170), but whether mainstream cinemagoers will sit still a second time for a lengthy Mel Gibson epic delivered in an obscure language (the ancient Yucatan dialect) remains to be seen. Especially when its depiction of a war-mongering empire on the arrogant cusp of destruction has contemporary parallels which, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Gibson has been heard to play up. “There’s a lot of effort made to intertwine the story of one man running for his life with the theme of civilisational collapse,” says Safinia. “But this is not a doom- laden film. There was a reason for the title — it’s Greek, and it means revelation, unveiling and new beginning.”

Nor can they count on legions of viewers from the Christian right to bail Gibson out this time. “Mel is an artist; his religion and beliefs are part of who he is. But I wouldn’t go into the film trawling for signs from the Book of the Apocalypse. That’s not what it’s about.”

• Apocalypto is out in Britain on Jan 5