This incredibly harsh critique of Mel Gibson’s latest movie is actually quite insightful:

The message? The end is near and the savior has come. Gibson’s efforts at authenticity of location and language might, for some viewers, mask his blatantly colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess.

Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamusel this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in “Apocalypto,” no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities. Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-1990s.

The Nation provides an even starker contrast:

Ancient Maya culture was extraordinary, as the rest of the world now recognizes. The Maya invented one of the few original systems of phonetic writing (we are familiar with the Chinese system and the one that culminated in Latin script). They worked with the concept of zero long before it was known in Europe. They were superb astronomers. Their art and architecture are now known and studied throughout the world. It is also true that they were warriors and that they engaged in human sacrifice, although not on the grand scale of the Mexica. Their ability to manage large-scale military and civic works was impressive. Maya literature has a long and grand history, from the ancient words incised in stone through the Pop Wuj (Popol Vuh) and the postinvasion books of Chilam Balam to the eighteenth-century poems (“Kay Nicte”–Flower Song–and others) to contemporary works, including brilliant poetry by Briceida Cuevas Cob in Yucatecan Maya and Humberto Ak’abal in Ki’che and Miguel Angel May May’s delightful fables.

Culture doesn’t sell tickets. Violence does. Gibson has made what he calls “a chase movie.” As we saw his Scot disemboweled and his Jesus battered into bloody meat, we will now see a young Maya running through the jungle to escape having his still beating heart torn from his chest.

Ouch. With so much interesting material to choose from that might reveal new understanding of Maya culture and depict the complexity of a civilization in decline, it seems a shame he focused on basic violence. Sounds like it should have been an Itchy & Scratchy short on the Simpsons instead of a full length feature movie. Of course since his career was jumpstarted by a particularly violent episode, maybe that’s the filter he sees everything through:

The night before an audition, he got into a fight, and his face was badly beaten, an accident that won him the role.

Don’t think I need to see his violent fantasies anytime soon, if ever, especially at they seem to miss the fundamental fact that it was the post-decline lack of cohesion in the Maya empire that made it impossible to “conquer”. Gibson apparently prefers to skew facts to excite his audience and feed historic prejudices, rather than try to really understand things as they are/were. Then again, he’s trying to make big money, not win a nobel prize…

Wonder if anyone will do a comparison with another film in theaters now that seems to suffer from a somewhat similar problem:

Brazil’s state tourism body applauded U.S. film critics Tuesday for trashing a horror movie in which tourists get slaughtered in the country and said it was taking measures to offset any damage to its image abroad. […president of the tourism body Embratur] Pires said, “I prefer to think about what The New York Times said and what real tourists say, not the movie.”