Last night we watched Apocalypto, and even though I knew it wasn't going be remotely historically accurate especially given Mel Gibson's track record rewriting history (possibly to suit his devout Catholic agenda), I was prepared to give it a chance. I'd like to see how he would have dealt with the Spanish conquest mind you.
All in all the story's pretty basic. The tribe belonging to the central character Jaguar Paw, get attacked (full on and brutally) by another more powerful tribe. He manges to hide his pregnant wife and kid in a deep pit then gets himself captured with the rest of them. Their captors take them off to be sacrificed in order to appease Kukulkan because there is drought, pestilence etc. By some seemingly divine intervention (you can imagine how this appealed to Gibson) Jaguar Paw manages to escape. His ex-captors badly want him dead, but he has to survive and get back to his wife and child before they die in the pit.
It's only at this point that the film really comes to life. He's being pursued relentlessly through the jungle, trying to survive and well... it's classic action. However, I doubt that this is a film you would want to watch repeatedly. My wife got a bit fed up with the subtitles, but I think that in that respect, Gibson got it right. American accents on native tribesmen just would have been awful. In other respects, it seems that every commonly known aspect of Mayan culture is rolled out to please the viewer. Probably attempting to enable us to relate to historical concepts we're already familiar with ie. blood sacrifice, their ball courts etc. The cheesiest part however was the arrival of the white man at the end, I just couldn't see the point of it. Still, worthwhile seeing, if only once!
