Is this movie anywhere near historical accuracy Veeky Forums?

Is this movie anywhere near historical accuracy Veeky Forums?

Tell me about the Mayans. What are the main differences between Maya and Aztec culture?

Other urls found in this thread:

muse.jhu.edu/article/218973/pdf
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

>Is this movie anywhere near historical accuracy

Yeah, humans have engaged in running throughout history.

It's not terrible for a movie, but it only depicts the decline of the Maya, so it's obviously darker and dramatized.

Historians used to think of the Maya as peaceful compared to the Aztecs but how much of that is based on exaggerations in Spanish writings isn't known.

Very inaccurate.

It's to my understanding that the Mayans did not actually perform ritual sacrifice to the degree depicted in the movie. They would indeed sacrifice humans but I don't think it was long lines of slaves waiting their turn to have their hearts cut out.

No. It's a good movie for what it is - story and plot wise - but beyond that there are some major historical inaccuracies. The original intent was for it to be centered on the Maya, but the amount of focus on human sacrifice makes it seem like it's portraying the Aztecs, who are likely to have practiced it the most by far. There also huge discrepancies in the timeline the movie presents and the historical timeline of the Mayan civilization, which collapsed around the 9th century yet the movie presents it as being active up until European arrival.
In regards to minor details, some appear factual while others clearly are not, which would be excusable if the most major aspects of the movie weren't completely out of touch to the point of it almost being disrespectful to both Mayan and Aztec culture to mix them in such a way.
I honestly wonder what Mel Gibson's intentions were for this movie.

>Is this movie anywhere near historical accuracy Veeky Forums?
100%

Not mine but this review by a scholar is spot on.

The film opens with a jungle. A group of Yucatec Mayan-speaking hunters chase a Tapir through a thick rainforest and kill it. The warriors then begin distributing animal parts as trophies. Their cliche man-the-hunter ceremony and erectile dysfunction jokes are interrupted by a group of fellow Yucatec-speaking refugees passing through the area. They give no explanation as to what happened to them other than that their lands were "ravaged." Then, the hunters return to the village, which appears to be a small cluster of thatch-roof wooden huts in the middle of a jungle.

Unlike the actual Maya, these people appear to have no agriculture whatsoever. There are no fields, no gardens, no orchards, no women making tortillas. Instead, they appear to be largely hunter-gatherers - a mode of subsistence that had not been dominant in the region for over 2,000 years. Their architecture is equally simplistic. While the majority of commoner domestic structures were made of similar materials to the ones in the movie, they would have been larger and more solidly built. Frequently these wooden structures had stone foundations. (Compare what you see in the movie with the model in pic related)

>What are the main differences between Maya and Aztec culture
Language
Writing
Architecture
Agriculture
Maya weren't quite as fond of killing people but still enjoyed it.

>yet the movie presents it as being active up until European arrival.


It was

Contd.

But in addition to this, even small communities would have had an elite residence and a community temple. The Postclassic Yucatec Maya were organized in a political system that was, in many ways, a modified version of Classic Maya politics. Following the Classic Maya collapse, city-states of the Yucatan kept going and adopted a more corporatized form of government called a mutepal, where rulers acted through a council of prominent noblemen. After the collapse of Mayapan, much of the urban settlements in the Yucatan disintegrated, but village politics remained more-or-less unchanged. Towns and villages were organized into communal land-owning units called a cah. A small village like this one would likely be composed of a single cah, organized around a ruling lineage. The cah would in turn pay tribute to a lord called a batab, who would have lived in a plastered masonry house. Most villages would also have held a community shrine, which looked like small pyramids dedicated to the community's patron deity.

Mel Gibson's rural Maya are classless. Commoners are shown with piercings and ornamentation that would have typically been restricted to the nobility or honored warriors, and yet everybody's houses look like crude sheds without solid walls. The only hints of political organization for these people come when our protagonist appears worried about the refugees he saw earlier. At this point his father tells him not to worry, because in the morning the "elders" will meet on the "sacred hill" to consult the "spirits of the ancestors." Later they sit around a big campfire and the elder tells parables where animals talk to each other about human greed. This makes me wonder if Mel just wrote a bunch of cliches on strips of paper and pulled them randomly out of a hat to make this scene. I'm genuinely surprised they don't live in teepees and pass the peace pipe.

Tip toppest kek

Their sense of fashion and beauty standards were very different too.

>Gibson's consultant on the project was Richard Hansen, a respected Mayanist and professor at Idaho State University, as well as the president of the Foundation for Anthropological Research and Environmental Studies, which does preservation work and study in Guatemala. Gibson, a generous contributor to the group, now serves on its board of directors.

>Hansen defends the film, believing that his fellow Mayanists will be "pleasantly surprised." He says, "For the most part it is very accurate," and "I was amazed at the level of detail, the stone tools, gourds, iguana skins, strung up turkeys, just amazed." Yet, he adds, "there were things I didn't like that they went ahead and did anyway," and he agrees "there was a lot of artistic license taken," and that there is a mash-up of architectural styles, art, costume and ritual from different time periods during the millennium-long Maya reign.

>And the sacrifice, the gore, the Maya as savage? The film does "give the feeling they're a sadistic lot," Hansen says. "I'm a little apprehensive about how the contemporary Maya will take it."

Contd.

We're treated to a few more dick jokes. And then, seemingly without warning or provocation, the cast of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome arrives and attacks the village. The cartoonishly evil raiding party does not appear to have any political motivation for attacking this village. There are no regional politics at play. There were no ambassadors sent beforehand to offer the village a chance to surrender and pay tribute. They seem to attack for the sole purpose of collecting sacrifices. The unarmored soldiers wielding crudely made macuahuimeh (but no shields) easily defeat the locals who wield even more crudely made clubs. The survivors (excluding children) are tied up and claimed as captives for later sacrifice, as the warriors burn the entire village to the ground, for like, no reason.

The warriors then take the captives off into the jungle on their way back to the city. I want to skip ahead a bit here to a point near the end of the walk when the protagonist asks where they are going. To this, another captive says that he has heard legends of a place built of stone.

WHAT!? How the hell have these Yucatec Maya never heard of a city? This raises an interesting question: Where the fuck are they?

Where the Fuck is this Village?

The people in the movie are speaking Yucatec Mayan, and in a scene between the hunting site and the town we are shown a beach. Between this and the presence of tropical forest, there's really only one location they could be: the eastern Yucatan/Northeastern Peten - somewhere around modern-day Cancun and Belize. Any further to the southwest and there would be no beaches, and further Northwest was too arid to support the kind of tropical forest the movie portrays. Placed in this context, this village makes no sense.

It wasn't, not to the point depicted in the film. There were probably still smaller groups spread around, but the cities had largely been abandoned by then.

Mayans didn't have women IIRC

Contd.

The Maya rural landscape at this time was much more densely populated than he portrays. Take a look at this map in pic related of Postclassic sites in the Yucatan. The larger sites on that map (such as Chichen Itza and Mayapan) had collapsed by this point, but even still the idea that somebody living in the Yucatan has never heard of a city is ludicrous. There were some areas of wilderness but they were punctuated by huge tracts of farmland. There were some small hamlets of the size depicted in the movie, but there were also larger towns with thousands of people and stone architecture. Farmers and craftsmen from smaller villages went regularly to the larger towns to trade their wares. In fact, the entire region was criss-crossed with trade networks over land and water. The Eastern Yucatan actually traded with non-Maya cultures in the Carribean and Lower Central America, and artifacts from Central Mexico show up frequently in these sites as well. These were not isolated people.

Most of the larger city-states in this area had collapsed just a few centuries prior to this movie's beginning, nevertheless there were a few small cities/large towns along this stretch of coast, including Nito, Ecab, and Tulum (the latter of which has been restored, although the original architecture would have been plastered red and white.) There were also larger city-states in the Guatemala Highlands and the Western Yucatan (and I assume the raiding party is from the latter, since they're also speaking Yucatec).

Contd.

Archaeological evidence has confirmed that the Maya living in the region where the protagonist is likely from were trading with all of these regions. Trade corridors connecting the large highland kingdoms like the Quiche and the Cakchiquel with Western Yucatan city-states like Xicalanco and Campeche passed through the area. And yet, surprisingly, these blissfully ignorant natives have never heard of either, nor have they ever seen a stone building before. And this is despite the fact that they're sitting on top of the ancient Classic Period heartland. Seriously, in that area you can't throw a rock without hitting a pyramid.

This ties into the larger picture that Mel is trying to paint about rural Maya society: a regurgitation of the Noble Savage stereotype. The rural Maya here are portrayed as living in a pure, uncorrupted world. They are tied to their land as hunter-gatherers. They have no political systems, no organized religion. Their tools and shelters are crudely constructed, but they're happy in their naive Eden, because they simply don't know any better.

What really pisses me off about this is that Mel almost presents it apologetically. As if this 'positive' portrayal of rural Maya is meant to counteract the extremely negative one that he will attach to their urban counterparts.

Contd.

The caravan arrives somewhere in Mordor where teams of slave laborers are firing quicklime for the dark lord Sauron. Or, at least, I think that's what happening.

None are spared from the brutal conditions of the slave camps, not even sick children or the elderly. We then arrive at a surprisingly accurate depiction of a Mesoamerican market. Rubber and quicklime and cloth and food are sold at apportioned places. Women and men in the community are actually wearing Maya clothing, and scenes of construction show both contemporary architecture and accurate scaffolding. (Although I have to say that is a shitload of quicklime. Mel seems to have some kind of obsession with the stuff.)

Honestly, I have to give props to Mel here. He clearly actually consulted experts for this scene. From a material culture standpoint, this is actually a fairly accurate representation of a Mesoamerican city. Of course, the things he does get wrong are rather telling. Everything, from the clothing to the buildings to peoples faces, seems to be devoid of color. There are no plants in the place at all, and everything is extremely filthy. Human suffering seems to be ever present. Everything appears disordered and chaotic - a tone which is made explicit when a scuffle breaks out in the slave market that quickly spirals out of control. In all, the entire scene has an extremely dystopian tint.

Contd.

The captives are then confronted by a bunch of women with numbers tattooed on their foreheads (for some reason) who slather them in blue dye in preparation for a sacrificial ritual. They enter the temple precinct by walking past a massive gateway covered in random calendrical glyphs with no apparent sentence structure and a mural depicting human sacrifice. At this point the captives just now seem to figure out what's going on. These guys must be pretty dense. Sacrifice, human and otherwise, was a central part of Mesoamerican religion. It is inconceivable that a Mayan-speaking people would not have heard of it.

Any remaining veneer of historical accuracy is dissolved when the captives arrive in the middle of a Classic Period plaza which appears to be hosting a rave. Throngs of people gyrate and chant in a seemingly catatonic stupor, raising their hands in the air like they just don't care. Heads placed on pikes (not a Maya custom) are scattered throughout the plaza. The temple appears to be operating on assembly-line mode as endless streams of blue-painted captives are shuffled up to the summit, sacrificed, and ritually decapitated. Our protagonist and his band of merry men make their way up to the top where they meet the city's king, who is clearly stoned, and a priest wearing a Chac headdress standing over a distinctly un-Mesoamerican altar.

Contd.

Our protagonist's companion is sacrificed, but when it's his turn he's saved by the sudden appearance of a solar eclipse. The populace freaks out, but the priest apparently knows better. He calms their fears with some bullshit speech about the sun being "full" and the eclipse passes. Seemingly freed from his fate, the warriors who captured him take him and the other captives to a ballcourt where they decide to hunt them for sport. Woops, that's actually Leslie Banks from The Most Dangerous Game. Here we are. Against all odds, our hero escapes his captors only to discover an open mass grave of sacrificial victims. This starts a chase sequence that eventually ends on a beach where "first contact" is initiated between the Maya and the Spanish (we'll get to that later).

The Real Urban Landscape

This scene is painful to watch. It paints a false picture yet grants it a certain legitimacy through detailed costumes and sets. It's clear that Mel put a lot into the details of the city. Unfortunately, it is in no way based on the Postclassic Maya. Instead virtually everything - from the Apron Molding architectural style to the costumes to the urban layout - seems to draw from the Classic Period Maya. Even the size of the city is bogus. As I mentioned in the previous installment, the largest cities in the Yucatan at this time were in the western Acalan region. Population estimates for this time period are hard to come by. This is due to the fact that most Postclassic cities are covered by modern cities and so they defy comprehensive archaeological survey. No pre-Columbian sources that could indicate population survive, and by the time the Spanish colonial authorities took a formal census most of the population had died from smallpox.

Contd.

We can get some idea of the size of Yucatan cities from the accounts of the conquistadors. Here's Bernal Diaz del Castillo describing a typical Late Postclassic city called Ecab on the northern end of the Yucatan:

>From the ships we could see a large town standing back about two leagues from the coast, and as we had never seen such a large town in the island of Cuba nor in Hispaniola, we named it the Great Cairo. ... [There] was a small plaza with three [temples] built of masonry, which served as cues [pyramids] and oratories. These houses contained many [ceramic] idols, some with faces of demons and others with women's faces.

Here he is describing the main plaza in Champoton - one of the larger cities in the region:

>They lead us to some large houses very well built of masonry, which were the temples of their idols, and on the walls there were figured the bodies of many great serpents and other pictures of evil looking idols. ... At all this we stood wondering, as they were things never seen or heard of before.

So while these settlements were certainly impressive to the conquistadors that encountered them, they're nowhere near the size and scale depicted in Apocalypto.

Roys (1957) claims that at the time of contact the city of Campeche had 3,000 households. If we assume 5 people per household (a conservative estimate), this would place the total population of the city at 15,000. This would have been one of the larger cities in the area. There are a number of reasons that the actual population of Campeche may have been higher than this (european diseases, more people per household, intentional underreporting of number of households to reduce tribute burden, etc.). But even if we're extremely liberal in our estimates, I don't think we can reliably conclude that there was a single city in the Yucatan at this time that exceeded 30,000 people. Mel Gibson doesn't provide us with a detailed map of the city, but based on the scale of monumental architecture, I'd say the city he's depicting here is at least twice that size. Cities this big had not existed in the Maya Lowlands since the Classic Period - 700 years before the arrival of the Spanish. (There were cities this big in the Central Mexican Plateau at this time, but they didn't speak Yucatec Mayan.)

To be fair to Mel, if he were attempting to set this movie in the Classic period (he's not) then the architecture and costumes would actually be fairly accurate. However, the blood orgy emanating from the main temple is complete fiction. Human sacrifice is one of these "sexy" topics in Mesoamerican history/archaeology. But in reality there were numerous societies worldwide that ritualistically killed people for religious reasons - especially if you include retainer sacrifice to accompany a dead ruler to the afterlife. And while I wouldn't necessarily characterize it as 'human sacrifice,' executing people for religious crimes (such as burnings at the stake) is something I would place in the same general category. When compared cross-culturally, Mesoamericans (with the exception of the Aztecs) did not practice human sacrifice more frequently than other cultures which did so.

Contd.

Sacrifices accompanied major religious festivals and post-war celebrations. But at no point did the Maya produce the kind of mass executions that are shown in Apocalypto. The Aztes of central Mexico did practice human sacrifice on that scale, but the Maya did not. Nor did the Maya place the heads of sacrificial victims on pikes, or toss their decapitated bodies into open pits. They would not have been so irreverent in the way they disposed of sacrificial victims' bodies. They were sacrifices. Willing or not, they gave their lives to renew the pact between humans and the gods. Putting the morality of such killings aside, the Maya treated sacrificial victims with a great deal of reverence.

A Tale of Two Peoples

Mel Gibson's portrayal of the urban Maya is almost the polar opposite of the way he depicts the rural Maya. The rural Maya in Apocalypto are 'dumbed down' - less sophisticated than they really were. By contrast, urban Maya society is shown as much larger and more urbanized than it was at the time period in question. The rural Maya are painted with an idealistic, romanticized brush. They are shown as a naive, "natural," almost childlike people. On the other hand, urban Maya society is shown as decadent, cruel, exploitive, and downright genocidal. The contrast here is meaningful. Rather than portraying the Maya as one unified culture with both rural and urban components, Apocalypto divides them into two separate cultures - one urban and one rural. The two are shown as oppositional, with the urban society oppressing and exploiting the rural one.

>I honestly wonder what Mel Gibson's intentions were for this movie.
From: muse.jhu.edu/article/218973/pdf

>In interviews, Gibson makes it clear—by referring to the war in Iraq, environmental destruction, and rampant consumerism—that he wants the bloodthirsty Mayans to represent an American society of spectacle and waste. He wants us to see the Mayan civilization as somehow “us.”

Contd.

Why? What is Mel Gibson trying to accomplish by establishing this false dichotomy between rural and urban Maya? One could make the argument that the urban Maya are simply the antagonists in the movie, and his attempt to portray them in this way is just part of making them the "bad guys." Perhaps I am a cynic, but I don't see this as that benign. By presenting the rural and urban Maya as distinct, oppositional cultures, Mel is effectively robbing the rural Maya (and by extension modern Maya) of any credit for the achievements of their urban counterparts.

In the third and final installment of this review, I will argue that this is part of a larger narrative that Mel is constructing that is ultimately designed to justify the Spanish conquest. Unlike the previous two parts - which focused mainly on facts - the final part will be mostly my opinions and interpretations regarding what I consider to be the "big picture" of the movie.

Contd.

>They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house.

-- Bartolomé de las Casas, A Short Account of the Devastation of the Indies, 1552

I am biased.

I have spent the past five years of my life studying Mesoamerican cultures. I've excavated at archaeological sites east and west of the Isthmus, over all three major epochs of Mesoamerican chronology. I've personally held the bones of an ancient Maya man in my hands. I don't think it's possible to study any time period in history without developing an emotional connection to the people who lived through it. The quote I opened this page with doesn't describe Mesoamerican human sacrifice; it describes the actions of the Conquistadors who destroyed them. When I read accounts of how these people were treated under the yoke of the Spanish Empire it makes me sick to my stomach. I imagine that others who study similarly violent periods in history get much the same feeling. I want to drop another quote by Bartolomé de las Casas:

>We can estimate very surely and truthfully that in the forty years that have passed, with the infernal actions of the Christians, there have been unjustly slain more than twelve million men, women, and children. In truth, I believe without trying to deceive myself that the number of the slain is more like fifteen million.

The mass graves depicted in Apocalypto were real. They were not filled with Maya humans sacrifices, but the victims of the Spanish conquests.

Contd.

Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined the word 'genocide' in the aftermath of the Holocaust, surveyed previous historical events that he believed constituted a precedent for the concept. The treatment of native peoples by the conquistadors in Latin America was on his list. The Spanish didn't just conquer and kill the Maya people. Their goal was to systematically eliminate the native culture. And for the most part, it was successful. Colonial authorities raided libraries in Mexico and Central America and burned any books they could find, leaving only a handful that happened to be smuggled out of the country beforehand. Native people were treated like property, and converts caught practicing the old religions were subject to painful executions.

How you talk about this period in history matters, and not just to me. There are millions of indigenous people in Latin America today that face racial discrimination on a daily basis - a remnant of the racial caste system imposed by colonial authorities. Talking about this period in history is like talking about the slave trade - it's sensitive. If you tell their story you have a responsibility to do it right. And frankly, Mel Gibson does not. In this review, I'll walk through the film again, but this time I'll point out the places where I believe Mel Gibson tips his hand. I'll argue that when you understand what Apocalypto is really saying, you'll see it's not just wrong, but offensive.

>I honestly wonder what Mel Gibson's intentions were for this movie.
Mel Gibson's histories follow these themes.
>Fuck England
>Fuck Jews
>Fuck Yeah, Catholicism.

Contd.

Apocalypto's Thesis Statement

Much like this review, Mel Gibson opens his film with a quote, which is presented here in its entirety:

>A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. -- W. Durant

What the fuck is that supposed to mean? This is a film about the Maya, I assume? So if I may, let me rephrase this quote to use it the way I assume Mel Gibson intends it to be read:

>The Maya were conquered by the Spanish because they had already destroyed themselves.

What this quote is effectively claiming is that the Spanish were not ultimately responsible for the Spanish conquest. Although the Spanish may have conquered them from without, the Maya had already really conquered themselves from within. So while the Spanish may have been responsible for specific atrocities, they weren't really responsible for the conquest as a whole. That had been preordained before they even got there. A point which is driven home again later in the movie.

Contd.
The village had just been ransacked by our completely ahistorical band of Maya einsatzgruppen and the captives were being lead back to the city to be sacrificed in a mass execution.

A smallpox-ridden girl appears in the trail on the way back to the city. The Maya warriors apparently know what Smallpox is, and poke her with a stick to keep her away. (This is despite the fact that the Maya learned about the Spanish in 1508, but the first smallpox outbreak was in 1518.) The music changes and a series of trippy camera angles lets us know that something "spooky" is about to happen. The smallpox-ridden child then pulls out her best creepy-little-kid voice, and says:

>You fear me? So you should, all you who are vile. Would you like to know how you will die?

She then delivers a blow-by-blow of what's about to happen in the rest of the movie, before concluding with a prophecy of Doom for the entire Maya civilization.

>For the one he [the protagonist] will take you to will cancel the sky and scratch out the earth. Scratch you out, and end your world.

I really hope Mel isn't implying what I think he is. Somebody correct me please. Because it really sounds like he's implying the Spanish conquest and subsequent smallpox outbreak are divine retribution for human sacrifice. I suppose that depends on what you consider the supernatural source of this prophecy to be, but knowing Mel Gibson I assume he's implying its the Christian God. One could argue that the scene is simply foreshadowing for the plot of the movie. But given the context of the senseless violence of the preceding scene, the presence of sacrificial captives in the background, and how urban Maya civlization is depicted in the following scenes, it seems an awful lot like it's got a "you deserve this" message.

Contd.

The choice of a smallpox victim to convey this prophetic vision is also really significant. Earlier I quoted Bartolomé de las Casas as positing the death toll from the Spanish conquest at 12 million. That estimate is actually too low, because he's not including the earliest (and deadliest) smallpox outbreaks that accompanied the conquest itself. These early outbreaks killed at least 50% of the population of Mesoamerica. And here the prophet of doom is a smallpox victim which claims the "vile" should "fear" her. Is Mel saying the Maya should fear the child? Or is he saying they should fear smallpox? Or is God speaking through the child? In which case is Mel Gibson claiming that the Maya should fear God?

Lets take a look at the end of the movie:

Here Come the Christians to Save the Indians

Our hero has narrowly escaped from the urban slaughterhouse and has managed to take out most of his pursuers using his "knowledge of the jungle" ala James Cameron's Avatar. Nevertheless, he's been wounded, his pregnant wife is giving birth in a flooding cenote, and the remaining Maya raiders are hot on his heels. Broken and beaten, he stumbles out of the jungle onto a beach, and collapses from exhuastion. How will he ever escape? Is this not the end our our beloved Jaguar Paw?

Don't be gay.

Contd.

Nope. Just offshore is a Spanish fleet. In fact, they're sending somebody ashore right now. Oh, and look, they're carrying a giant cross! (I love how he gives us a close up. You know, just in case we missed it.) The best part is that the pursuers are so awestruck by the sight that they let our plucky protagonist go. Man, thank God those Spanish showed up when they did, huh? Otherwise he would have died! Luckily good ole' Jaguar Paw rescues his wife and returns to the jungle to "seek a new beginning."

Saving the Indians from Themselves

In Part 2 of this review, I argued that Mel Gibson juxtaposed two extreme exaggerations of Maya culture. He portrayed the rural Maya as simple, naive, "Noble Savages." Urban Maya were shown as dystopian, decadent, and excessively violent. I also argued that the reason that he did this was to turn the Maya against each other. Well, now we come full circle. I can now answer why I think he did this.

There is a popular perception - mostly incorrect - that the Spanish conquest destroyed the urban native cultures while leaving the rural ones in tact. It is true that essentially all of the Maya peoples living today descended from rural populations. It is also true that essentially all of the urban culture was destroyed. But rural people were devastated just as much by the Spanish conquest as urban people were because they were the same fucking people.

...

Well it was not sure how facts are gay.

>It wasn't

They were one of the hardest groups to conquer and resisted for a very long time from their cities in the jungle. Would you like to google it?

Contd.

By turning the rural Maya against the urban Maya, Mel Gibson is then able to have the conquistadors arrive and "save" the rural Maya by destroying their urban counterparts. In fact, this is exactly what happens in the movie. Our hero escapes because the Spanish arrive. It is implied, through the quote at the beginning and the smallpox omen, that the urban Maya culture will be subsequently destroyed (which we the audience also knows to be true).

Further, Mel Gibson indicates that they deserve it. The smallpox-ridden prophet tells them this explicitly. And we, as the audience, are inclined to agree because of how he depicts them. Look at the mass sacrifices they were committing! Look at the violence they were committing against these poor, simple jungle-dwellers who did nothing to them! The conquistadors can't even really be blamed, because the Maya were destroying themselves anyways, as the quote at the beginning implies. And to rub the point in, the Christian symbolism reminds us that the Spanish aren't just saving these poor peoples lives, they're saving their souls.

>caring about Veeky Forums
>not a queer

We don't know, they had detailed written history but the Catholics decided it was evil and destroyed fucking all of it.

Contd.

The truth, is of course, much more horrifying. If you look at the Maya not as two peoples (rural and urban), but one people, then the Spanish aren't really saving anybody. The conquistadors used Catholicism as a justification for conquest. In fact, the pope sanctioned the Spanish conquests in the New World on the grounds that this would allow them to convert the native population. It seems as if Mel Gibson is regurgitating this justification once again. This excuse rings as hollow today as it did back then. I'll end this review the way I began it, since Bartolomé de las Casas is so much more eloquent than me:

>Their reason for killing and destroying such an infinite number of souls is that the Christians have an ultimate aim, which is to acquire gold, and to swell themselves with riches in a very brief time and thus rise to a high estate disproportionate to their merits.

Nah it's not. Fashion was never just a womens thing.

Queer.

Good read. Thanks for posting

I said not to the point presented in the film, because the extent of the city presented there would have more likely been true to the Maya before the collapse. I'm not arguing that they didn't have a presence, but that the movie's portrayal of it in the context of the European arrival is exaggerated.

I'll take that as a compliment sweetie.

Yup, queer.

Thanks for the read, m8.
The butthurt of the author is pretty, but nothing astounding.

I don't think the events in the film are set during a period of normalcy for the depicted city-state. It seems that they have accelerated the sacrifice process due to the sickness and crop failures, shown in the scenes of them approaching the city, as well as the eclipse (obviously the head dudes knew the eclipse was coming)

Thanks for the read. As far as movie criticim goes it's bad, but anthropologically and historically it's pretty interesting. I definitely agree that even for a layman it felt like several time periods were being smashed together to make the film work.

I appreciate the critique of the movie's historical accuracy but did he have to write like such a dickhead?

I wrote an article about Late Rome in film for a Greek and Roman studies journal and if I'd made even one snarky remark I would've been canned.

He's got some sort of weird hateboner for Mel Gibson and goes on a big diatribe towards the end too. It's embarrassing.

The ammount of assumptions that the autor makes about mel Gibson supposed intentions is hilarious, and the way the article is written just makes him come as really assblasted. Thanks for sharing it anyway m8.

If you replace mayan with aztec, the movie becomes mega acurate. The confusion is due ti the language used in the movie.

Historybuffs did a video on it just watch that

>fuck jews

Israel is literally a disrupting factor.

This. I hate this movie for that. It's extremely inaccurate, even though all it would take to fix that is changing the Maya for the Aztecs.

>agriculture
are you bimplying that the Mayans didn't farm or that they used different techniques?

because both civilizations were agraristic only that the aztecs due their location (lake valley of Mexico) invented a technique called chinampas which were kind of floating gardens where they grew their plants, and Mayans used the burnt soil technique which is still used in the region by their descendants

It probably isn't very accurate at all, but among all the movies that depict those societies, it's probably the most accurate.

I mean, the Passion of the Christ also got shit for being inaccurate, and yet it basically follows the biblical narrative as much as it possibly can.

Sadly this is true. There's hardly any movies really about the ancient Maya. The ones I can think of are the Road to El Dorado, which was a Mayaincatec mishmash really, Kingdom of Crystal skull? Suicide Squad had bits of it.And then theres Kingdom of the Sun with Yul Bryner. Damn, it's sad there's not any good movies about precolumbian mesoamerica.

The last few seconds (where you see Spanish conquistadores arriving) is inaccurate because Mayan civilization had already died hundreds of years before, but if you cut out that then it's pretty good.

Village in beginning should have looked more like this, it was missing farms and gardens which were part of every maya village. Agriculture was a huge deal for the Maya, it was central to their religion. It'd be like showing medieval europe without crops.

Theres also not many movies about ancient China or India as well. Turns out Western audiences arent very interested in non-Western historical films, although this is understandable.

>It'd be like showing medieval europe without crops
Basically every movie about Medieval Europe does this. The most you'll get is a small pig or sheep pen with no fields for them to graze

Theres some pretty decent ones made by their own countries. Mexican film industry is just not interested in their own culture, they prefer American or Anime stuff.

They didn't /not/ show their fields, as in, the movie didn't show a lack of agriculture, it just didn't feature it.

>Village in beginning
they weren't Mayans though, they were a hunter gatherer tribe in the jungle

Then why were they speaking Maya and had their numbers and glyphs tatooed on them? Their neighbors nearby also wouldn't be that different to them. There were few hunter gatherer societies in mesoamerica by the 1500s.

To be fair, Mel Gibson is a gargantuan cunt. It's a well-known fact that he hates Jews and the English, among other things, and loves Catholics.

To interpret the film as a justification for the Spanish colonisation of the Americas is hardly an unfair assumption.

Why does he hate the english so much?

weird form of US nationalism.

Americans who have """""""""""Irish""""""""""""" and/or """"""""""""""Scottish"""""""""""""" ancestry sometimes hate the English

Alright, how did we get this many posts in before someone mentioned the Spanish showing up 700 years early at the end of the film? (Which I'd [spoiler], if Veeky Forums had spoilers, though, it'd be a bit odd if it did.)

As someone else said... If you were watching a film covering Henry V, and during the Battle of Agincourt, he pulled out an iPhone, would you even ask the question if the film was historically accurate? Because that's the equivalent of how this film ends.

But yes, while it fails to be historically accurate on every level, that's all you really need to know to guess as to the accuracy rest. There are literally Doctor Who episodes more historically accurate than this.

>There are literally Doctor Who episodes more historically accurate than this.
As historically inaccurate as Doctor Who regularly is (lately purely for PSA reasons), that's actually not a mistake I'd expect even Moffat to make.

The maya still existed after that, its not like they just disappeared and the Spanish colonized an empty Yucatan peninsula

wtf I love Mel now

Is he, dare I say it, /ourguy/ ?
Just have to turn him into a Francophile

The desctruction of whole cities and enslavement of the people happened quite often during the conquest if you follow the spanish own accounts

Fuck, I would love a sequel when we get to see the Spaniards interacting with the locals and BTFOing the Satanic Atzec empire

>satanic
It's like you're literally from the middle ages.

Oh my God it's fucking funny ok?

I like adding a bit of spirit when I write for fuck's sake this isn't a 100% serious site for fuck's sake, lad...

>t. Hernan Cortez

>Poe's Law
That is still exactly how some modern Christians like to judge other religions.

This. what really pisses me off is that they start the movie in the mayan classic period and then at the end toss the spainiards in like wtf

the spanish had time travel technology