http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/17764

Gibson's Passion of the Mayans is Part Action, Part Propaganda

By Bill Kilpatrick
January 16, 2008

Apocalypto, Mel Gibson's follow-up to The Passion of the Christ, is an
effective actioner, with one major problem: Its own pretentiousness, as
social commentary, puts Gibson on a short leash. When he starts departing
from known facts, it's hard to know whether he's just being sloppy or
whether he's pushing propaganda.

Great direction need not be in the service of either truth or
entertainment. Leni Riefenstahl will be remembered as one of the greatest
directors of all time, but Triumph of the Will was no popcorn classic. It
was a love note to Hitler and the boys. Coming off of a one-two punch of
ethnic insensitivity, in The Passion of the Christ, and his explicit
antisemitic rant, the last thing Gibson needs is to mix popcorn and
politics.

Yet that's exactly what Apocalypto seems to do. It opens with a quote from
Will Durant, that no civilization is conquered from without until it has
destroyed itself within. That's the kind of heavy-handed statement that
screams, "Sermon!" Is Gibson using his tale to call the rest of us to
repentance? It sure looks like it.

But then Mel tries to have it both ways. His story, set during the period
of the Mayans, shows a small, peaceful tribe, tucked in the rainforest,
ravaged by Mayan warriors, bent on taking men back to be sacrificed to
their god, Kulkulcan. What follows is a fairly brutal, gory, wrenching
laundry list of atrocities - Abu Ghraib with nachos. It's ugly. It's
mean-spirited. It's hard to blow off as just another Indiana Jones and the
Temple of Doom.

And yet, Gibson's facts are grossly misleading. The Mayans were farmers.
They didn't live in the rainforest. They didn't live off of primitive
hunting. They were astronomers, mathematicians, innovators in writing, art
and architecture. Their god, Kulkulcan, was a white, bearded god associated
with peace, farming and the resurrection. Sound like anyone you've heard
of?

The Kulkulcan of this film is more like the Aztec god of war,
Huitzilopochtli. In fact, these Mayans look more like the Aztecs. And well
they should. The actual Mayans went into decline five centuries before the
Spanish arrived. It wasn't Mayan civilization that got bested by the
Spanish. It was the Aztecs. Gibson ignores the experts - who say the Mayans
were done in by drought, disease, political unrest, soil exhaustion,
disruption of trade routes and overuse of their resources. In Mel Gibsonia,
their society was overthrown because of human sacrifice.

But human sacrifice, which was practiced by the Mayans, was practiced by
all pre-Columbian civilizations, the Aztecs more than anyone else. It
wasn't an everyday event. It wasn't even done with the degree to which we
execute people in our own time. To the ancients, the rain that fell from
heaven was the blood of the gods, which had to be replenished with human
blood. Like the sacrifices of the Old Testament, human sacrifice required
the best you could offer - not some poor slob who got awakened by frat boys
with jaded blades. Sacrificial candidates were honored, feted, sex objects
and routinely offered drugs to deaden the pain. Sacrifice was considered a
consecration, not a method of torture or a form of terror.

That Gibson would want to jazz up the action in an action-adventure is
fine. But pretentious sermonizing, mixed with the faux-realism of native
actors speaking in Mayan, while presenting the Mayans as barbarians fit to
be conquered, pushes past popcorn and straight into propaganda.

That's when we wonder what Gibson is really up to. It's no secret that he
wears his cross to the right of the Pope. Could he be trying to say that
the Spanish Conquest of America was an act of liberation? What better way
to make the case that Cortes and company were a 16th-century Seventh Army
than to equate Mayan civilization with the death camps of the Holocaust?

In doing so, Apocalypto seems to be saying that one of Catholicism's most
shameful moments - in granting approval to conquest and enslavement of
indigenous peoples - was really an act of charity. For all its action-based
spills and thrills - and this film has more than its share - that's still a
pretty offensive message, maybe even as offensive as suggesting that the
Jews were to blame for the Roman execution of Christ.

Whatever the case, in the absence of a Mayan version of the Jewish
Anti-Defamation League, Mel Gibson may have finally found a group he can
malign with impunity. If they want to enjoy this Passion in the jungle,
with a little bit of The Patriot and Mad Max thrown in, audiences should
stick to the action. If they want real history, they should read something
other than a subtitle.