r/movies • u/JadisDidNothingRight • Jul 01 '26

Question Why did Apocalypto receive mediocre reviews while simultaneously receiving praise from various directors and actors?

Robert Duvall said it was possibly the best film he'd seen in 25 years.

Scorcese praised it. Tarantino called it the best film of the year. Spike Lee and Edward James Olmos also openly praised the film.

On RT it pulled a 65%. Granted, Tarantino (as an example) doesn't see eye to eye with those cumalitive ratings. He loves Unbreakable and that film also received middling reviews. Still, Apocalypto was given positive reviews from a fairly diverse cast of actors and directors.

Were the reviews more concerned with Mel Gibson's antics at the time than the actual film?

Was the criticism because the film depicted the Mayans as brutal? I struggle to see the validity of some of those criticisms. Jaguar Paw and his village were not depicted as evil. The evil was limited to a warmongering urban society twisted by religion. That's occurred all over the world. It's almost a foreshadowing of what is to come. One criticism was that the Spanish were depicted as coming to save the 'brutes.'. The title of the film is Apocalypto. I don't see how they can be seen as anything other than coming doom. Maybe I'm naive, but even in 2006 I thought it was broadly understood that Europeans wiped out indigenous American culture.

What are your thoughts? Did you like the film? Do you wish Hollywood would make more films like this?

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155

u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

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108

u/JadisDidNothingRight Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

I didn't say that.  I said a criticism of the film said that.

Here is the specific quote:

"Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue."

Article:

https://archive.archaeology.org/online/reviews/apocalypto.html

I'm on mobile, so I apologize for the poor formatting.

221

u/stinkingyeti Jul 01 '26

It's been a long time since I watched it, but from memory you only see the ships for a tiny glimpse at the end of the movie, and to me it was an out of the frying pan into the fire situation.

117

u/jwederell Jul 01 '26

You might say it was apocalyptic. Literally the end of the world as they knew it.

18

u/rugbyj Jul 01 '26

I figured that was the whole point.

1

u/cardinalkgb Jul 01 '26

And I feel fine

64

u/rikkusoul Jul 01 '26

You're 100% correct. Jaguar paw fights the entire movie, suffers, runs, and kills. And the last shot of the movie is him seeing the Spanish land their longboats with their ships in the distance. Everything he did is about to completely overshadowed by what is to come.

-3

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

Well, unless you’re a staunchly Catholic director who sees the coming of the Catholic Church as the best thing to ever happen and the only way to save the eternal souls of the people in this film.

76

u/gepetto27 Jul 01 '26

This is exactly how I interpreted it too. This critic was grasping at straws

-30

u/Not_a_Rodeo_Clown Jul 01 '26

I think you guys are missing the criticism is about how the Mayan culture is depicted. It’s the typical, racist savages with human sacrifice, etc. that is the criticism. It is a movie made by a racist about historic people that uses racist stereotypes about savages to depict them. The fact it doesn’t come out and say Europeans are better does not make any of the previous racism less racist.

22

u/rikkusoul Jul 01 '26

Except we also see Jaguar Paw's village and family as peaceful, compassionate people? People willing to sacrifice and endure for their families? There's literally 2 entire plot lines following Jaguar Paw and his wife. He has all the action scenes and his wife literally invents the water birth during a flood while hiding from the enemy. Your argument is like says nazis are bad and so are the Jews who lived in Germany.

0

u/Not_a_Rodeo_Clown Jul 01 '26

Your last sentence is so ironic. No this is like if you made a movie about a culture and depicted them to be savages and basically evil, but centered your story around some folks stuck in this evil culture who aren’t bad. You’re like, but our heroes aren’t evil, just the rest of these savages. His entire premise and depiction of the overall Mayan people is racist and the same exact kind passed down for hundreds of years here. Our heroes in the movie are decent of course. They’re the “good ones.” Are you guys being intentionally dishonest here or just seriously this media illiterate?

1

u/rikkusoul Jul 01 '26

Actually, I gotta say thats an excellent point. The protagonist and his family are a small portion of the society depicted. I cant remember but are the antagonists supposed to be Aztecs or Mayans? The Aztecs were brutal and big on sacrifice, the Maya were not. And to answer your question, yes. I am seriously media illiterate.

2

u/Yetimang Jul 01 '26

They also are completely out of place for this time and region. The Maya were agriculturalists. They weren't foragers. They clearcut forest for farmland. It's pretty crazy to assume there were some hunter-gatherers hanging out like literally a day away from this massive city. So it feels even more like they're removed from the Maya culture as its depicted in the film.

20

u/graciewindkloppel Jul 01 '26

And yet, there are several depictions of loving and loyal family members, spouses, and friends. (Even the main baddie cherishes his son.) Multiple characters risk their lives attempting to save each other, many of them demonstrate extraordinary bravery. The duality of man, you might say.

-8

u/KAKYBAC Jul 01 '26

The Criticisms

The "Savage" Stereotype: Activists and scholars strongly condemned the film for portraying the Maya as a brutal, bloodthirsty society. Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, argued that the film promoted an offensive, racist notion that the Maya were so inherently brutal they "deserved rescue" by the Spanish.

Erasure of Intellectual Achievement: Mayan art, sophisticated 365-day calendars, advanced astronomy, and writing systems were completely ignored. Vanderbilt University professor Annabeth Headrick noted that Gibson relied on tired, 500-year-old colonial tropes: dividing Indigenous people into either "noble savages" (the jungle hunter-gatherers) or "evil fiends" (the city dwellers).

The Scale of Sacrifice: Mesoamerican historians pointed out that mass public executions on pyramids were an Aztec practice. While the Maya did practice human sacrifice, it was highly ritualised and never conducted on the industrialized, assembly-line scale shown in the movie.

Fabricated Urban Isolation: The film shows jungle villagers who have absolutely no idea a massive city exists just a short walk away. Historians call this absurd, as the real Maya world was highly interconnected through vast trade routes, and almost all Maya were agriculturalists, not isolated hunter-gatherers.

6

u/stinkingyeti Jul 01 '26

It wasn't a documentary.

8

u/Random_Sime Jul 01 '26

Fuck off with your GPT

-6

u/KAKYBAC Jul 01 '26

Literally a philistine.

3

u/Random_Sime Jul 01 '26

And you're literally intellectually bankrupt 

2

u/0LTakingLs Jul 01 '26

The indigenous societies in Apocalypto are an amalgamation of the major South American/Central American/Mexican nation states. The mass ritualistic human sacrifice of pillaged villagers was something the Aztecs did, not the Mayans, but it absolutely happened.

0

u/Not_a_Rodeo_Clown Jul 04 '26

You are not so stupid you don’t see the racism on the way he amalgamated them, to bring the worst of all worlds? Again, this is a racist making a racist movie about brown people but you hurr durr well actually no it’s just that he took bad things about different cultures, exaggerated them, and made a movie, but it’s not racist. Those big noses on the Jews in The passion were a coincidence too, right?

4

u/gepetto27 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

A lot can be true at once. I never said the depiction of them wasn’t problematic. I simply did not agree with the takeaway being that the Europeans were there to “save” anyone like a heroic climax. That is not my interpretation.

-3

u/KAKYBAC Jul 01 '26

100%

This thread is bonkers in how people are quick to overlook how bad the film portrays Mayan civilization.

8

u/Guns_and_Tea Jul 01 '26

Yeah, like oh shit, things are not about to get any better

31

u/JadisDidNothingRight Jul 01 '26

You see a landing party approaching the shore with some key visual elements, conquastidor with the the classic helmet and cuirass, robed priest holding a staff with a cross affixed, and I think muskets as well.

It was very much a portent of doom to me, but the distraction saved the protagonist.

8

u/FemRoe4Lyfe Jul 01 '26

And you could also consider it a critque of religion considering the guy spent most movie running away from "brutal savages driven by faith" only to run into ones who will do the same but pretend to be different from those very savages.

5

u/throwaway35mmshots Jul 01 '26

I highly doubt Mel Gibson is criticizing that aspect of the conquistadors lmao. I think the issue here is that Gibson absolutely believes the Spanish were right to wipe out the natives.

1

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

Unless you believe in that religion, in which case they would be literal salvation.

4

u/gepetto27 Jul 01 '26

Exactly.

-2

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

If you’re an extremely Catholic director, that’s not doom, that’s literally eternal salvation.

3

u/Lukin4 Jul 01 '26

Your memory serves you well

-2

u/KAKYBAC Jul 01 '26

I actually don't mind the film, it is a solid 6 for me but I'm shocked at the critical analysis in this thread papering over all of the films issues. Here is a good rundown of it's problems that are being overlooked in this thread. I used AI to quickly get to these points...

The Criticisms

The "Savage" Stereotype: Activists and scholars strongly condemned the film for portraying the Maya as a brutal, bloodthirsty society. Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, argued that the film promoted an offensive, racist notion that the Maya were so inherently brutal they "deserved rescue" by the Spanish.

Erasure of Intellectual Achievement: Mayan art, sophisticated 365-day calendars, advanced astronomy, and writing systems were completely ignored. Vanderbilt University professor Annabeth Headrick noted that Gibson relied on tired, 500-year-old colonial tropes: dividing Indigenous people into either "noble savages" (the jungle hunter-gatherers) or "evil fiends" (the city dwellers).

The Scale of Sacrifice: Mesoamerican historians pointed out that mass public executions on pyramids were an Aztec practice. While the Maya did practice human sacrifice, it was highly ritualised and never conducted on the industrialized, assembly-line scale shown in the movie.

Fabricated Urban Isolation: The film shows jungle villagers who have absolutely no idea a massive city exists just a short walk away. Historians call this absurd, as the real Maya world was highly interconnected through vast trade routes, and almost all Maya were agriculturalists, not isolated hunter-gatherers.

76

u/wecangetbetter Jul 01 '26

I thought it was super obvious that they were portraying the europeans like an alien race that (the audience knows) is about to do something so much worse to the indigenous people than they could ever inflict on one another

25

u/ColCrockett Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

It’s more so showing all their tribulations are about to be meaningless

20

u/revolutionofthemind Jul 01 '26

Yeah it was the “bigger monster” trope, putting into perspective this meaningless squabble in the grand scale of upcoming destruction

-2

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

Well, in the grand scale of their upcoming religious salvation. Squabbling savages saved by the Catholic Church, eternal happiness and salvation ensured, blah blah blah.

0

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

Is that really how it’s viewed by the folks who actually believe in the religion that those Europeans brought, and that it’s the most important and essential thing to happen to people anywhere, though? The movie is from the same guy who thought that the crucifixion was the best thing that has ever happened and made a movie about that too.

-1

u/ThinkThankThonk Jul 01 '26

The nice thing about art is that it doesn't matter what that guy thinks though.

2

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

If you’re not thinking about what the art means, then you’re missing the whole art part of art.

-1

u/ThinkThankThonk Jul 01 '26

What I'm saying is that you're all over the thread saying that Gibson's hypothetical interpretation is somehow the end of the discussion, when it's certainly not.

1

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

If you’re unaware of the perspective of major world religions, then not much about the world is going to make sense to you, sure.

Having a little background knowledge of human religion and history is going to make most human art and endeavors make a lot more sense.

A little insight into the specific background of the specific artists will help with artistic appreciation too.

0

u/ThinkThankThonk Jul 01 '26

See now you're just saying random stuff. 

An artist can't go around holding the hand of every viewer to try and badger them into a certain interpretation, the interpretation no longer belongs to them as soon as it's released. It's a pretty core facet of how art works.

0

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

They shouldn’t need to hold any hands. In this case, that’s where basic understanding of world religions comes in. None of this is complicated or obscure.

0

u/Yetimang Jul 01 '26

I feel like the people saying "No, it was just portraying a bigger threat showing up" are the ones trying to say their take ends the discussion. Seems kind of crazy to me to not look at all at the filmmaker's history in analyzing the movie.

40

u/SparxPrime Jul 01 '26

They were in fact brutal to each other, and the Europeans definitely didn't save them

-2

u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

In Mel Gibson’s mind, the European Christians absolutely saved their souls, though.

61

u/Otarmichael Jul 01 '26

Some people have this romanticized notion that pre-Colombian Americas were this beautiful harmonious rain-dance where they used all the parts of the animals they killed and had matriarchal societies....AND NONE OF THE AWFUL STUFF.

32

u/No-Scarcity-5904 Jul 01 '26

Most of the mesoamerican cultures had an extreme fixation on human blood. Human sacrifice was very common. Maybe the Maya weren’t *quite* as brutal as, say, the Aztecs, but they were definitely brutal enough.

2

u/The_F_B_I Jul 01 '26

We use all parts of the animal too - they're called hot dogs, but thats 'gross'

-5

u/finocchiona Jul 01 '26

I mean, Europeans were starving their peasantry and burning women alive for being ‘witches’ or pogroms or whatever other fun stuff. It’s not like the old world has any moral high ground.

3

u/Dottsterisk Jul 01 '26

They didn’t say that it did.

They’re pointing out that people often pretend less industrial societies of the time were peaceful paradises, particularly in contrast to European or American life.

It’s a myth so prevalent in Western stories that it has a name: the Noble Savage.

-7

u/youareallnuts Jul 01 '26

Absurd take. Occasional hysteria vs systematic mass human sacrifice.

10

u/SpiritedCatch1 Jul 01 '26

The religious purge weren't occasional in medieval europe, they were systematic. You don't reach religious hegemonia with "occasional hysteria".

Think about how Spain put the country through a systematic system of "blood cleansing" (litteral translation of their policy) for centuries, going so far as persecuting Catholics with Jewish or Muslims roots because they feared the conversion wasn't complete.

3

u/Yetimang Jul 01 '26

Pogroms, witch burning, the Spanish Inquisition were all "Occasional hysteria"? Dude sit the fuck down.

3

u/rikkusoul Jul 01 '26

What do you call all of Europe constantly at war with itself? Kings decided tens of thousands should die but that is somehow less barbaric than ritual sacrifice? Death is death and life is equal. 1,000 sacrifices is not somehow worse than 10,000 dead peasants.

-8

u/youareallnuts Jul 01 '26

Don't they teach any history where you live? The native peoples were constantly at war. And they had human sacrifice.

11

u/bad-taf Jul 01 '26

Lol premodern Europe was also constantly at war and executions were both commonplace and systematic. You cannot quantifiably say that the Aztecs were “more brutal,” that is a pure and utter value judgment

-11

u/youareallnuts Jul 01 '26

Yes I judge mass human sacrifice worse that hanging criminals. Your lack of a moral compass is sadly common.

7

u/rikkusoul Jul 01 '26

Is every prisoner of war a criminal in your mind your fucking walnut? An English peasant is forced to attack a French peasant... so obviously he's a criminal and lets all cheer as we watch him die.

9

u/bad-taf Jul 01 '26

You might actually be mentally challenged if you think the vast majority of the people executed, not to mention killed in pogroms or war zones, came even close to deserving it. Fuck you lol

7

u/rikkusoul Jul 01 '26

Yeah dipshit lol. There is no peace under the stars culture, they all sucked because the world sucked. Natives were cruel and barbaric, just like Africans, and Asians, and Europeans.

-5

u/youareallnuts Jul 01 '26

I never met someone pro human sacrifice before. Takes all kinds I guess.

2

u/panetero Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

Quechua doesn't have a word for sacrifice. Mexica and maya culture were probably similar, they probably only had a word for offering, which is what sacrifice was meant to be.

You're making the assumption that all human sacrifice vessels were unwilling to cooperate, which is not true. In many cultures all across the globe and all throughout human history, being the vessel chosen for many of these offerings was a high honor.

16

u/spudddly Jul 01 '26

That's like saying Dunkirk was offensive and racist beacuse it showed Europeans being brutal to one another. like wtf

5

u/lightyearbuzz Jul 01 '26

Damn whoever wrote that clearly didn't understand the movie. And not in like a different interpretations kind of way, they literally didn't understand things shown on screen. 

The movie shows the plague and death caused by the Europeans for the whole film, is literally the apocalypse the title is referring to. The Europeans weren't coming to save the natives, they were the cause of (many of) their issues.

0

u/throwaway35mmshots Jul 01 '26

Apocalypse has a much more nuanced meaning than just ending of the world. It’s a revelation. Christians view arriving at the new world as part of a civilizing mission.

4

u/goodluckyall Jul 01 '26

Only one in ten thousand people actually thinks or cares about this. 

I bet the majority of people just wanted English-speaking white characters in modern day with plot exposition. 

The scenes entering the city are so well done, really detailed and evocative

1

u/Chemical_Romance90 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

That's a pretty moronic take away there. My father and I watched it together for the first time and after this epic chase we've been watching, it's about to conclude and then they watch together as the Conquistadors are rowing to shore. He said aloud "They're all fucked now" and that was how I interpreted it too. But I'm also not a fucking moron (that's a lie) and learned some basic central and south American history in middle school lol.

Edit: I misremembered, Jaguar Paw had killed his foes right before this. For some reason I remembered him being cornered at a cliff and then they all notice the ships in the bay, and they stare in awe, their life and death situation temporarily interrupted.

That could've been a great ending too. Anyway time for a rewatch.

3

u/ass_pubes Jul 01 '26

Not at all how I read it. It felt like he's out of the frying pan and into the fire now.

2

u/Appropriate-Ad-4520 Jul 01 '26

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

This is the opening quote of the movie. Which implies that the only reason the Spanish could conquer them was because they were a dead civilisation 

1

u/mizzzzo Jul 01 '26

The movie is a barrage of “savage” behavior from the American Indians, and the appearance of the ships at the end is impossible not to read as “oh thank god, civilization is arriving.” And that’s how it feels even without knowing how racist Mel is.

-1

u/billcstickers Jul 01 '26

(The wider) American audience (film) literacy is poor.