Does the film Apocalypto do a disservice to history?
Yes it did!! In the movie, the story is set in per-Columbian Central America, with the Mayan Empire in decline. Villagers who survived a savage attack are taken by their captors through the jungle to the central Mayan city. Among the villagers is Jaguar Paw, who has hidden his wife and child from the attackers with a promise that he will return for them. A Maya ruler sits silently as his priests butcher captives in the fashion of the Aztecs of highland Mexico. He has no words, no songs, history, and name. He is a rich, powerful, and cruel leader. In stark contrast, the people of the forest in Apocalypto, the defenders of nature, are funny, wise, handsome, beautiful, and profoundly naive. They are primitives, innocent of the corruptive influences of civilization and urban society, and follow the natural law that given to them from generation to generation by their great grandparents. Joy, suffer, and triumph are the interchangeable depiction in the movie.
At the first seen, the film immerse in the Mayan world where family and friends bring happiness to each other and where success is measured by the care one gives one’s family. One of the light moments comes during when a member of the happy hunting party is tricked into eating the testicles of the pig so that he might finally be able to impregnate his wife. Following, the leader of the family, convinced his son if he rubs a chilly paper in his [son] private part he could able to make two children’s right away, but it turns out to be a set up made by the elder. Then it’s when this joyful families life turned upside down by one of the local clans. Jaguar Pawn, realized the danger that’s coming toward him, and run trying to save his pregnant wife, and son. It’s true there are similar circumstances as the old age; Sudan will be our prime example. The people of Darfur have the same religion, and the same language. Because of their skin color difference, Janjaweed one the Sudanese clan, is displacing, killing, torturing, raping woman and children.
On the second seen, the clan took the villagers as slave, for sacrifice and women for slaves, leaving the children to die alone in the jungle. In this process, hundreds of men are sacrificed on an Aztec-style [Pyramid Style] sacrificial stone, their headless bodies thrown into a crowded of people to cheer the. This will depict a true history what happened to Jews by the Hands of Hitler, millions of Jews suffered, and killed because of their religion differences. Also, this kind of barbaric action is still now happening in most Muslim world. For instance, in Sharia law if a female caught adulterating, there will be a chance she will be sentenced stoned to death. Killing in Mayans society saw it as a ritual ceremony, and would consider anyone who dissented as insane. Because of this tradition hundreds and thousands of Mayan have vanished for the sake of Sun religion.
In the third, the jungle hero Jaguar Paw escapes the city about to excute himd down till the end of the sea by his enemy, with literally nowhere else to turn except to out run his killers. When dangerous religions believe insanity crashes down on Jaguar Paw and his family, it is as if they had come for our own. The message is that defending one’s family is a just, a right reason for employing violence; that collecting young men to offer as human sacrifices. I sight Jesus as an example, knowing the atrocities perpetrated by the Mayans actually happened makes the fear of the monster within man even greater, more telling. Believing that some poor and near defenseless father, fought to preserve their loved ones from such atrocity is heartening. The strength and courage of Jaguar Paw symbolizes that one can triumph from any kind of difficulties if there is a set of mind. The sacrifice of the sacred king abused to its most offensive and irreverent extent by the misled mindlessness of the murder cult of the Mayan religion. When the little girl explains the end of the Mayan world, one expects her description of “he who brings the jaguar” to end with her intoning, “Because he is the Kwisatz Haderach!” Some speculates that the end of the world is soon. Tfhe movie 2012 is based on the Mayan calendar and what the little girl saying about the collapse of the Mayan Empire, might be true as today. The struggle of right against wrong, the even deeper story of the struggle between truth and falsehood drive this movie
All in all, the world is not a safe place and history shows that the most dangerous force is always government and the crime syndicates that grow up around it. The same high priesthood that manipulated and controlled the Mayan tribes of thousands of years ago was beholden to the same statecraft of tyranny that is embraced by our rulers today. Apocalypto is the very definition of this message and its power obtains it the accolade of the most important film of our generation.