Apocalypto and the end of the wrong civilisation

Mel Gibson's Mayan film gets the human sacrifice rituals luridly accurate - pity they're Aztec ceremonies, not Mayan
Sophisticated culture ... Apocalypto

Apocalypto and the end of the wrong civilisation


Director: Mel Gibson
Entertainment grade: C–
History grade: Fail

The Maya dominated Mexico's Yucatán peninsula until the 16th century. Their sophisticated political systems, extraordinary visual culture, advanced science and development of the only written language in the Americas have long endeared them to historians. But in the 1520s, Spanish conquistadors arrived in Yucatán, signalling the beginning of the end for Mayan civilisation.


Peaceful village life, before the arrival of guns and syphilis

The film opens with a quote about the Roman empire from Will Durant: "A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." In other words, Apocalypto blames the Mayan people for being conquered. Actually, the Mayans put up a pretty good fight – partly because their civilisation was integrated and coherent, not destroyed, by the time the Spanish arrived. The real reason the Spanish were able to conquer the Americas was that they had guns and syphilis, against which the indigenous peoples had sticks and no antibodies.


A bunch of Mayan villagers are hanging out in the jungle, improbably hunting big game with a zany Indiana Jones-style contraption that looks like a giant sideways meat tenderiser. They use this to swat a tapir to death, and divide its flesh up between them. Someone cons the big lunk of the gang into eating its testicles, at which they all fall about laughing. The big lunk reacts by telling a mother-in-law joke. Then someone else tricks him into rubbing hot chilli sauce on his own private parts. Admittedly, not much is known about Mayan humour, but there is no reason to assume it would have been exactly like that of spoilt American frat boys.


Obviously the baddie

Another lot of Mayans roll up. You can tell these ones are evil, because they are scowling, have weirder facial piercings, and wear epaulettes made of human jawbones. The bad Mayans take the good Mayans prisoner, and march them off to the big city. It is full of drugged-up dancers with bones through their noses, terrifying masks and jade-inlaid teeth, blood-drenched high priests making towers of skulls, and ghostly underlings caked in white mud. Remarkably similar to the scene if you get off at Camden tube station at 11.30 on a Saturday night, but not much like anything from Mayan history.


Human sacrifice day in Maya Town

Bad news for our plucky heroes: it's human sacrifice day in Maya Town. The ceremony shown here is very faithful to the most lurid sources on the Aztec ritual. The victims are splayed on a column at the top of a pyramid, and a priest cracks their ribcage open with an obsidian knife to pluck out their still-beating hearts. Just one problem: Mayans weren't Aztecs. They did go in for a bit of human sacrifice, but it was more a case of throwing the occasional child down a well for the water god to eat. Which really wasn't super nice, either.


The sets, costumes, references to plague-like diseases and social context of the film seem to set Apocalypto firmly in the ninth century, when the classic Mayan collapse took place. And yet, all of a sudden, a boatload of Spaniards turn up waving great big Christian crosses. During the ninth century, the area that is now Spain was still mostly an Islamic caliphate called al-Andalus. Even the craziest of conspiracy theories do not suggest that Spain set about conquering the Americas before it had invented itself. But Mel Gibson does. This film is set in completely the wrong century.


Apocalypto seems to have been made to argue that Mayan civilisation was evil and revolting, and that it was a jolly good thing the Spanish turned up to conquer it. That view is quite difficult to sustain if you know any of the basic facts about Mayan civilisation or the Spanish conquest. The movie doesn't: it is mostly about the wrong people and at least 600 years out of date. It fails, hard.