Apocalypto’s Sacrifice of Mayan Culture

You may know about the native American culture through movies, TV shows, and other forms of media, however, you may want to reconsider how much of the culture you watched was true. Mel Gibson’s film “Apocalypto” is an action movie taking place during the Mayan collapse, showing the different parts of Mayan culture. It starts off with our protagonist in a village that gets ransacked and destroyed by another group. Then, he is transported to a Mayan city to await being sacrificed, however, he escapes and the rest of the movie is him running away from the group. However, what Mel Gibson fails to do is to accurately show the culture. He gets the historical events, the chronological order, and the entire culture wrong. Therefore, Apocalypto’s dramatization of the indigenous people of the Americas destroys their historical values by disregarding the people themselves, their narrative, and their culture.  

            Apocalypto portrays the people of the Mayan empire, yet it does it in such a disrespectful and incorrect way. The movie is made to be extremely dramatized, and Mel Gibson turns what should be a historically accurate retelling of a lost civilization, into an action movie that just has the background of a native American civilization. Robert W. Welkos in “Apocalypto, fact and fiction play hide and seek” states, “The final decision when making a film is, ‘What is the right balance between historical authenticity and making it exciting, visually as well?’’ said Farhad Safinia, who cowrote the script with Gibson, adding: “The film is an all out entertainment thrill ride, and that is what it was always designed to do. It is a work of fiction.” When the co-writer of the movie states how over-exaggerated it is, that is how you know it is misleading and historically inaccurate. Mel Gibson uses these people as a backdrop to make another action thriller of his, and this aspect of the movie is extremely disrespectful to the actual descendants of Mayan culture. The reason why this is disrespectful is because it completely misrepresents them as savages who just kill each other all the time, and this is not true. This misled the public into believing this is what they were, when in reality they were an advanced civilization with knowledge in astronomy, agriculture, and warfare. However, the reason why Mel Gibson chooses to take this route is because of cold hard cash. 

            Money is what runs the film industry, and this cannot be more true in the case of Hollywood. They try to create as much revenue for the movie studios as possible, with the cost of making subpar movies, and this movie is a great example. Patrick Masters in “Historical movies: why a good story is more important than the facts” says, “Filmmakers must rework an episode from history to become a marketable narrative that will be attractive to audiences and provide a financial return for investors. In the “definitive edition” of the DVD of Kingdom of Heaven, screenwriter William Monahan explained the need for writers to compromise history: “You use what plays, or can be made to play, and you don’t use what doesn’t.” This employee of the film industry exposes how audiences need to be entertained and the fact is that most historically accurate movies do not enthrall the audience. So, they decide to tweak what actually happened to make the story more cohesive and interesting, and this is what brings in the cash. In Apocalypto, Mel Gibson does this numerous times such as the incorrect clothing choices of the Mayans, the lack of cooking/agriculture (paints them as savages), and the previously mentioned hyper-violence. Writers and directors such as Mel Gibson make the script marketable to audiences to return a profit, and that takes precedence over actual historical accuracy.

            Apocalypto has extreme inaccuracies in the representation of Mayan culture, by showing an entirely different culture and just slapping the Mayan label on it. The Aztec culture was another civilization in the old Americas, and even though both were in the same region, they were over 600 years apart. However, this does not matter to Mel Gibson, since he decides to merge both cultures together to make the movie how he wants, completely ignoring the actual Mayan culture in history. Alex Von Tunzelmann in “Apocalypto and the end of the wrong civilisation” explains, “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.” Alex explains how the hyper-violent sacrifices that are a main point in the story are not even a part of Mayan culture, but instead Aztec. This just proves once more that Mel Gibson does not care about being respectful of the culture he is making a movie of. This is like if you merged German and French culture and called it French. This in itself is a major flaw in the movie, however, this is not the worst historical inaccuracy or disrespectful thing Mel Gibson did while making this.

            The worst part of this movie is the chronological order being astronomically wrong. This movie is supposedly set during the Mayan collapse (800-1000), with the agriculture of the Americas starting to die out, while showing events that would not happen until centuries later. In the last part of the movie, they show Spanish conquistadors arriving on the beach (1492), which happened almost 500 years later. Nick Hodges in “History Buffs: Apocalypto” says how absolutely absurd this is because Spain as a country did not even exist during the Mayan collapse. Spain was a part of an Islamic Caliphate at the time, so it would have been impossible for non-existent conquistadors to show up on a newly discovered continent. Alongside this, he shows how the environmental problems that the Mayans dealt with in this movie did not even exist during the arrival of the Spaniards. This is hands-down the worst historical inaccuracy in the entire movie. Historical inaccuracy is a complete disregard and lack of respect for the real people and real culture that this movie is based upon.

            In conclusion, Apocalypto by Mel Gibson has some of the worst historical inaccuracies in a movie I have ever seen. He has completely misconstrued the Mayan culture by ignoring facts to add action, merging two completely different cultures into one, and getting the timeline wrong. All three of these issues lead to a bigger problem, in which it blatantly disrespects real Mayan culture by showing a facade of what they actually are. When the average person watches this movie, they will not question what they see and think this is how it really went down. It destroys any positive imagery that the Mayans once had up to this point. This is inexcusable and Mel Gibson is to blame for this. As for my findings, my thesis was fully supported by multiple different sources, and it is widely accepted that this movie is very historically inaccurate. Now it is up to us to call out directors like Mel Gibson and not give him the money that comes out of our pockets to watch his so-called “historical movies”. There is so much rich culture in the world, that if it is covered, it should be done respectfully, accurately, and professionally.