![apocalypto historical accuracy apocalypto historical accuracy](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fMtO_COgn0M/Xrx9XvlXJSI/AAAAAAAAJkQ/_A4t3lh_H4wisO4vImjDD-Ewk11o7IWgACLcBGAsYHQ/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/Cricket%2B19%2B%2528v1300%2529%2BFitGirl%2BRepack%2BBy_%2BZuk%25C3%25A9t%2BCr%25C3%25A9ation.png)
At every turn, Gibson militarizes human existence. He turns every aspect of human existence into a matter of warfare: a story about national politics is about warring nations a story about cultural collapse is about cultural warfare and violent self-destruction and a story about human salvation becomes a story of spiritual warfare. The question is: who in their right mind would seek to join him? Gibson may be the best at making blood-and-gore epics, but being the best does not make it right or even worth watching. When it comes to unnecessarily violent epics, Gibson is in a league all his own. We’ve seen this kind of story elsewhere, but Gibson just happens to excel at making this kind of film. Apocalypto stands much closer to Braveheart in terms of its story and replicates a storyline that has become boringly standard fare in Hollywood today: one man fights off dozens of other men in an attempt to rescue his family. One almost gets the sense from Passion that he makes up for his nonviolent lead character by escalating the violence perpetrated by the Roman soldiers. Gibson, it seems, is incapable of telling a story which is not replete with exceedingly violent images. If there is anything that holds these films together apart from the Christ complexes of each main character, it is violence. Where Gibson goes wrong, however, is another story altogether. What Gibson does right is convey something very abstract through localized and concrete imagery. Gibson uses these individual men (they are always male) to tell much grander stories about national freedom, cultural collapse, or humanity’s salvation. Just as Braveheart is about more than simply the freedom of Scotland from English rule, so too Apocalypto is about more than simply the collapse of the Mayan culture. Finally, the story of Jaguar Paw is a very focused narrative (the film rarely strays away from him throughout the 158 minutes) which is representative of societal self-destruction.
![apocalypto historical accuracy apocalypto historical accuracy](https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/p/playboy-the-mansion-gold-edition-mpd/playboy-the-mansion-gold-edition_1.jpg)
The story of Christ’s passion is obvious and serves as a kind of leitmotif throughout all of Gibson’s films. The epic narrative of Wallace is representative of the broader struggle for sociopolitical freedom not only in Scotland but in other countries as well, including the United States (hence Gibson’s involvement in The Patriot). As with his past movies, the story of Jaguar Paw functions as a kind of metanarrative: it is a narrative snapshot that seeks to give an iconic window into a much larger story. Jaguar is clearly parallel to William Wallace and Jesus of Nazareth in Gibson’s other films, and it becomes clear in Apocalypto that he is simply telling his own version of the Christ story in different forms. Here it is Jaguar Paw, a young leader in his tribe. In Apocalypto, again as with Braveheart and Passion, Gibson tells the story of one person, one family, in place of many people and many families. For all his myriad faults, Gibson at least understands that art is not a textbook about reality but an encounter with it. As one can see most clearly in The Passion of the Christ, what drives Gibson is not historical reality but rather a particular kind of vision-a kind of aesthetic sight that gives him the liberty to distort reality in order to tell the story he wishes to communicate. When it comes to film, Gibson has never been interested in history. Like his Scottish epic, Braveheart (1995), Apocalypto has only the most tenuous of connections with the actual history of the Mayan race, but this does not deter him in the least. Mel Gibson’s Mayan epic begins with an epigraph from historian Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” Gibson’s latest film focuses on the self-destruction of the Mayan civilization from the perspective of one man’s attempt to save his family.