Last night, we saw the big Mayan action-adventure movie from everyone's favorite drunken anti-semite. Given Mel Gibson's recent bad press, it was tempting to skip this one, but I, for one, am glad that I saw it. It was visually stunning, as one might expect from the director of Braveheart. From what my social-sciences colleagues tell me, it is very historically accurate (though I noticed that no one went around with their eyes crossed.)
The best thing I can say for the movie, I think, is that it left me wanting to learn more about the Mayan culture - and, tangentially, about Aztec and Incan culture.
Now, be warned, the movie is as gory and filled with realistic tribal nudity as one might expect, and it is not political commentary like some of his films are, so far as I can tell. It's just an action movie set in the Mayan civilization near its collapse under European conquest and disease.
One curious point, though, is that the film is introduced with a quote from Will Durant, Author of The Story of Civilization - "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within." If this is Gibson's idea of social commentary, then it is a poor one. If the goal is to depict the Mayans as degenerate and base, he fails woefully. While the city dwellers depicted in the film clearly have a poor understanding of epidemiology, the fact that Mayans engaged in sacrifice, and even human sacrifice, is not evidence to me that they were a corrupt people, only that their values and beliefs are different from my own and from the cultural norm of the society in which I live. In fact, Durant's quote refers to Rome: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars." The focal characters in Apocalypto are a beautifully simple tribal people with noble values and mundane failings and the destruction of their lifestyle comes about through the hunger of urban society - the conquest of modernization over agrarian life.
If the culture depicted in the film is corrupt, its corruption is no different from our own.
