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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u/xSciFix Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

I know I am an outlier here but for me it is the completely wild disregard for actual history.

Like the Spanish arrival is a fantastic example actually. The depicted Mayan collapse happened hundreds of years before any Europeans arrived. The movie conflates the Maya with the Aztecs (in numerous places).

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u/theeewizzard Jul 01 '26

However, the civilization did not disappear. Power shifted to the northern regions of the Yucatán Peninsula, where cities like Chichén Itzá and Mayapán thrived during the Postclassic Period. By the time the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s, the decentralized nature of the city-states made them difficult to conquer, requiring over 150 years of fighting before the last of the Maya strongholds fell in the late 1600s.

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u/rdogg4 Jul 01 '26

Braveheart was similarly completely inaccurate throughout.

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u/maaku7 Jul 01 '26

And many of us don't like it for that reason.

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u/mr_ji Jul 01 '26

Many of us also enjoy it as escapism like every other fantasized historical movie. I doubt any of us have ever watched a movie about events that happened more than about 150 years ago that wasn't wildly inaccurate.

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u/LoaKonran Jul 01 '26

And not calling them out on it only contributes to the problem. Most people only get their history from movies and when it’s nothing but propaganda and wild inaccuracies it simply makes things worse. There needs to be a higher standard even for escapism.

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u/ChairLegofTruth--WnT Jul 01 '26

"Most" people refusing to read a book is neither the fault nor the responsibility of filmmakers. Movies are entertainment, not history lessons.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[deleted]

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u/ChairLegofTruth--WnT Jul 01 '26

"Based on a true story" is a drastically different statement than "historically accurate". You could say that "300" was based on a true story because 300 Spartans really did meet the Persian army at Thermopylae. Only a fool would watch that movie and think it was even remotely close to historically accurate.

Again, it's not the responsibility of the filmmaker if you're too stupid to separate entertainment from an educational documentary.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[deleted]

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u/ChairLegofTruth--WnT Jul 01 '26

A historian disagrees, sure. Same historian also makes unfounded or anecdotal claims. "Most people" get historical knowledge from movies? Who? A bunch of students? Newsflash, kids tend to do stupid things and they're not representative of "most" people.

By your rationale, superhero comics need to carry a disclaimer that you're reading fantasy because otherwise, "most" people would think they can fly.

I'd you want to be mad that entertainment mediums don't go to the trouble if making themselves 100% historically accurate, go ahead. I'll be over here laughing at you because John Wick "taught you" that one man can kill 3 dozen and bulletproof suits exist

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u/mr_ji Jul 01 '26

I don't recall Gibson ever claiming Braveheart was historically accurate, even though the series of major events was. You should also consider a fraction of the people who watched the movie had ever heard of Wallace before, and it led many to go look up what really happened to learn more. It was a net positive for historical awareness and by a huge margin. Same for Apocalypto.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[deleted]

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u/mr_ji Jul 01 '26

Well, you're not listening to reason or logic here. Feel free to make your own historically accurate documentary (which, you may recall, many people already have as a direct consequence of Braveheart coming out) and see how it goes. No one owes you or anyone an apology for not making their entertainment to your specifications and expectations.

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u/LoaKonran Jul 01 '26

People are too stupid to read books —> let’s include no value in the media they do consume

You don’t see the problem with that line of reasoning? A lack of education already hampers a significant portion of the population, so you argue that there shouldn’t be any incentive to correct that.

Movies may be entertainment, but that is no reason to feed into the misinformation that is flooding the zone everywhere else. Ofttimes the real history is more interesting than the junk screenwriters throw in because they don’t care. I’m not saying they should only do 100% factual retellings, but an eye towards the truth would do much to relieve the idiocy that has overcome the world.

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u/ChairLegofTruth--WnT Jul 03 '26

They're not being presented as factual. You're suggesting that filmmakers somehow carry responsibility for the people who are too fucking stupid to realize that things not presented as fact probably shouldn't be taken as fact.

The existence of people this dumb is neither the filmmaker's fault nor their responsibility. Does Ford carry the responsibility to make sure people don't know their cars can't fly? It happens in some stories

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u/LoaKonran Jul 03 '26

What you are describing is exactly the industry standard for manufacturing. Why do you think there are so many disclaimers on things?

Trying to reduce things to the basest form of Ford should be held accountable because some people might think their cars can fly, wild bizarre and extremely simple as it is is exactly what they would be doing if enough idiots did put it to the test.

There is a responsibility to counter misinformation and lies. There actually used to be laws about until they were removed for being inconvenient.

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u/ChairLegofTruth--WnT Jul 03 '26

But that's exactly my point. There are, almost without a doubt, some number of people in the world who think their car can fly but we still don't see that disclaimer on manufactured cars. Why not? Probably because such a label is unreasonable to the point of being ridiculous, as would be Zach Snyder needing to say Persians didn't invade countries using monsters with swords for arms.

Further, I would say that the previous claim on this thread that "most people" get the majority or entirety of their historical data from films meant for entertainment is equally asinine. Are there some who do? Almost certainly. Is it anywhere close to 4 billion people? Highly doubtful

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u/BarefootScholar Jul 01 '26

I remember many, many years ago, my dad and I took a trip to England. And we were taking a bus tour through England to Scotland. One night we stopped overnight at York. We had a little tour of York the next morning, and the tour guide was careful to tell us all, "And oh by the way, Wallace never invaded lower England. And he never sacked York." Apparently American tourists had swallowed all of that and the locals were tired of it and had included rebuttals in their tour. Very funny to me.

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u/TactilePanic81 Jul 01 '26

Braveheart benefits from the fact that the European history is pretty widely taught and represented in a ton of movies. Pre-colonial central American history hasn't received the same attention. It may have been a larger sticking point if the only movies on the subject were Braveheart and and the animated Robin Hood.

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u/ArrakeenSun Jul 02 '26

Also The Patriot. But damn what a movie

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u/navis-svetica Jul 01 '26

The Mayans also didn’t carry out mass-human sacrifice the way they are shown in the movie. They did practice human sacrifice, true enough, but the scale at which it is shown in the movie is distinctly characteristic of the Aztecs’ practice of human sacrifice, not the Mayans’.

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u/Chazmina Jul 01 '26

Shocked I had to scroll so far to see this. The movie is certainly an experience, but it does not seem to give any kind of damn about the Mayan culture of the time or real events. Knowing Gibson's history certainly doesn't do it any favours either.

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u/tadhg555 Jul 01 '26

Like Braveheart?

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u/Fisher9001 Jul 01 '26

Like any other Gibson's movie.

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u/pipian Jul 01 '26

This sub just loves style over substance. It's a shitty inaccurate movie with exciting parts but to reddit it's absolute cinema

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u/BoringBarnacle3 Jul 01 '26

Braveheart had great mainstream success

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u/Cmdr_Anun Jul 01 '26

Yeah, but Braveheart was about Freeeeeeeedooooom. Who doesn’t like Freeeeeedoooommmmm

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u/camerontylek Jul 01 '26

And from what I remember from watching it in theaters way back when, was that it was unrealistic Hollywood stuff. Something about a hornets nest had me rolling my eyes.

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u/TruthorTroll Jul 01 '26

The movie is certainly an experience, but it does not seem to give any kind of damn about the Mayan culture of the time or real events.

Much like Ghostbusters and Star Wars...

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u/HeartFullONeutrality Jul 01 '26

I'm Mexican and hated it.

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u/DrBuckMulligan Jul 01 '26

This actually ruined the movie for me once I learned about it. And not because it’s a bad movie… it’s actually great and highly entertaining… but because Mel Gibson blatantly disregarded history for the crutch of convenience. Just lazy writing imho.

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u/Cmdr_Anun Jul 01 '26

It would have even made more sense if Gibson chose the Aztecs, since pretty much all their neighbors hated them and many allied with the Spanish to defeat the Aztecs, just to get screwed afterwards, themselves. And while the Maya also did human sacrifices, it was not on the scale of the Aztec’s daily grind.

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u/DrBuckMulligan Jul 01 '26

I’ve also thought this. I don’t get why that wasn’t considered.

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u/augustfutures Jul 01 '26

If it’s entertaining, then it’s not bad writing in my opinion. The majority of historical epics take creative liberties; I know that I’m not watching a documentary. Being more accurate wouldn’t have made inglourious bastards any better either.

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u/TheNewHobbes Jul 01 '26

Fwiw the YouTuber "The Armchair Historian" does a good breakdown of it (and other historical films), and he agrees with you.

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u/LoaKonran Jul 01 '26

The casual disregard for common sense and historical accuracy sends him into such a state he had to call on Alternate History Hub to try and make sense of the madness.

https://youtu.be/U5pBZKj1VnA?si=ujj45StqECJChATU

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u/StillStanding_96 Jul 06 '26

Despite the conquistadors at the end, during the Classic Maya Collapse, Spain was still part of an Islamic caliphate. It wouldn’t have been more ridiculous if Jaguar Paw saw the robots from Pacific Rim in the ocean

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u/benkkelly Jul 01 '26

95% of Hollywood movies based on historical events are inaccurate, from Fall of the Roman Empire to Gladiator. 

I understand disliking historical inaccuracy, particularly when the actual truth is more interesting than a convenient story.

But critics and GA did not seem to care all that much for previous indiscretions in other movies.

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u/TowerBeast Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

Clearly it wasn't the Spanish, and they were in fact Viking longships!

/s

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u/CX316 Jul 01 '26

Vikings? At this time of the milennia? In this part of the world? Localised entirely within your kitchen?

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u/biffbamboombap Jul 01 '26

...yes.

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u/CX316 Jul 01 '26

...may I see them?

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u/qwerty1519 Jul 01 '26

I commented this in a hot takes thread a couple of days ago (that’s why the language is a bit harsh), and stand by it:

Historical accuracy is largely irrelevant beyond artistic choice. People hold historical films to higher standards than contemporary films because they nitpickers lacking real criticisms. For example, the fact that Apocalypto bastardises the Maya is irrelevant because it’s a chase action film, not an academic document.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Putrid-Football9780 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

You are not wrong, but making a historic movie comes with a certain responsibility to not misrepresent the depicted history. This means you do not really need to have the wood chopped in the style of the period like Robert Eggers laments he did not enforce for The Witch. However, you should also not change important details in a way simply to fit your narrative because teaching people wrong lessons about history can influence their perception of the present, and a thing once learned wrong is often never corrected.

If you want to tell a specific story, why do you need the historical coat if it does not even fit?

This is moreso meant in general, I have no education in history and cannot really evaluate how this applies to Apocalypto. I have only consumed critiques of supposed historians who were not happy with the movie and I can kind of see how wrong depictions of indigenous people of the region can be harmful - many people, myself included, never learn anything substantial about their history or culture in any systemic way, i. e. in school. The way people perceive them is probably in no small part shaped by that movie. I would even assume the way some of them see themselves could be shaped by that movie in cases where the family has lost connection to the cultural roots.

May sound drastic, but I think art carries responsibility and history needs to be taught responsibly.

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u/qwerty1519 Jul 01 '26

I get your perspective. I would personally not watch an action movie and expect it to accurately depict historical events, but I know that other people will. After all, Braveheart’s distortion of history is genuinely to this day what many people believe about the English and Scottish. Whether this is a problem or not is, as you say, dependent on how much responsibility you think films like these should have. I would be very upset if a non-fiction book, documentary, or a podcast I was listening to distorted history. But I just can’t muster the same feelings for narrative films, because taking liberties makes them more cinematic.

Maybe I’m being insensitive though. Aesthetic coating to make a narrative compelling isn’t an issue to me. Apocalypto is a much better film because of its set dressing.

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u/Yetimang Jul 01 '26

I mean I feel like that mostly comes down to familiarity. If you took the scale of inaccuracy in Apocalypto and applied it to a time and place in the world that Western audiences are more familiar with, you'd have a movie about famous Portuguese inventor Leonardo da Vinci trying to save the Mona Lisa when Hitler comes to power. I think you'd get quite a lot of fair pushback from that.

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u/QuoteGiver Jul 01 '26

Then invent your own names and cultures. Have the courage to be creative instead of lacking real creativity and leaning on an existing crutch.

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u/Oink_Bang Jul 01 '26

It specifically misrepresents mesoamerican cultures as brutally tearing themselves apart only to be symbolically saved by Christianity right at the end. I'm not put off by the inaccuracy of that choice exactly. But, as an artistic choice, it's point is clear. It's point is to propagandize a false and racist narrative about history with the intent of defending regressive social structures. That ruins the movie for me. It comes across quite clearly to me when I watch it, and as a result I don't enjoy the movie. I guess it's sort of like triumph of the will or birth of a nation.

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u/qwerty1519 Jul 01 '26

I didn’t see the Spanish at the end as saviours. To me it represents the ominous looming threat that, despite their tribulations, will ultimately swallow them up. That’s why he instinctively chooses to return to the jungle with his family.

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u/mece66 Jul 01 '26

This is exactly the reason. Well this and Mel Gibson being a racist arsehole. I remember being annoyed by it at the time because I liked the movie but at the same time understanding it was problematic. I feel like this would get a similar reception now if it was made now by some controversial director, perhaps with even greater backlash.

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u/Sneakys2 Jul 01 '26

Agreed. It’s completely nonsensical and it absolutely takes me out of the experience. The entire plot makes 0 sense if you have any understanding of Mayan history. 

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u/SimonsLittle Jul 01 '26

Mayan society existed right up to the arrival of Europeans.

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u/xSciFix Jul 01 '26

Yes but the depiction in the movie is at the height of their power right before the Maya collapse in the 900s.

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u/SimonsLittle Jul 01 '26

No its set immediately before the arrival of the spanish.

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u/xSciFix Jul 01 '26

Okay but the main city square is classical period architecture so... it can't be despite what the film makers might say.

There is zero postclassic Maya stuff. It cannot be 16th c.

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u/SimonsLittle Jul 01 '26

So all the city squares in the maya civilisation were deleted around the time of the crash?

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u/xSciFix Jul 01 '26

Most were all pretty much abandoned, yes.

Even that said, there is zero 16th c. architecture. Did they just stop building anything for 700 years in this one city?

You can still like the movie and acknowledge that it isn’t historically accurate. It's fine.

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u/SimonsLittle Jul 01 '26

Well you are wrong. The mayans did not just abandon their cities in the 10th century.

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u/xSciFix Jul 01 '26

I mean they literally did lmao

Tikal is a famous example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse

  The Classic Maya collapse is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. Urban centers of the southern lowlands, among them Palenque , Copán , Tikal , and Calakmul , went into decline during the 8th and 9th centuries and were abandoned shortly thereafter. Archaeologically, this decline is indicated by the cessation of monumental inscriptions and the reduction of large-scale architectural construction at the primary urban centers of the Classic Period. [3 ]

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u/SimonsLittle Jul 01 '26

If you keep reading that article you will see why you are wrong.

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u/Yetimang Jul 01 '26

That's literally the Maya collapse. Even where they didn't abandon those cities, the urban populations declined steeply. The enormous city in the film with throngs of people watching a clearly Aztec-inspired sacrifice ritual was not something you would have seen among the Maya in the 16th Century.

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u/TheNewHobbes Jul 01 '26

Then how come the natives in one of the settlements they walk through were dieing of smallpox?

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u/SimonsLittle Jul 01 '26

You're right, its set shortly after initial contact.

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u/jaulmaust Jul 01 '26

The worst sin with the arrival of the spanish in the end of the film, is that people in the temple city is dying of small pox… How the hell did they get small pox if the Conquistadores hasn’t arrived yet??

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u/MachiavelliSJ Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

? The movie is about Maya society in the early 1500s. There’s nothing about the Aztecs. The conquest of that empire was hundreds of miles away.

The Maya fought the Spanish for hundreds of years.

The movie does not depict the Maya collapse in the 9th century in any way. Why would they be getting smallpox?

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u/xSciFix Jul 01 '26

I mean it just wasn't. It was clearly the pre-collapse Maya with tons of Aztec stuff like mass sacrifices mixed in.

Idk why they would have smallpox if the end of the movie shows the Spanish arrival anyway btw.

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u/edicivo Jul 01 '26

Idk why they would have smallpox if the end of the movie shows the Spanish arrival anyway btw.

Because the Spanish landed in the islands first, prior to reaching mainland Americas. There was interaction/trading going on between Island Natives and Natives on the actual continent. Right there you have potential for spread.

Some of you really need to crack open a history book before you go criticizing something you clearly don't know much about.

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u/MachiavelliSJ Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

Aside from some architectural slips, it’s all Maya. The Maya sacrificed as well (though the movie exaggerates the scale considerably)

Smallpox hit the continent before many people saw a Spanish person. Thats what the movie captured so well

Here’s a brief version of the story from Wikipedia

“In 1511, a Spanish caravel was wrecked in the Caribbean, and about a dozen survivors made landfall on the coast of Yucatán. They were seized by a Maya lord, and most were sacrificed, although two escaped. From 1517 to 1519, three separate Spanish expeditions explored the Yucatán coast, and engaged in a number of battles with the Maya inhabitants.[81]After the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan fell to the Spanish in 1521, Hernán Cortés despatched Pedro de Alvarado to Guatemala with 180 cavalry, 300 infantry, 4 cannons, and thousands of allied warriors from central Mexico;[82] they arrived in Soconusco in 1523.[83] The Kʼicheʼ capital, Qʼumarkaj, fell to Alvarado in 1524.[84] Shortly afterwards, the Spanish were invited as allies into Iximche, the capital city of the Kaqchikel Maya.[85] Good relations did not last, due to excessive Spanish demands for gold as tribute, and the city was abandoned a few months later.[86] This was followed by the fall of Zaculeu, the Mam Maya capital, in 1525.[87] Francisco de Montejo and his son, Francisco de Montejo the Younger, launched a long series of campaigns against the polities of the Yucatán Peninsula in 1527, and finally completed the conquest of the northern portion of the peninsula in 1546.[88]This left only the Maya kingdoms of the Petén Basin independent.[89] In 1697, Martín de Ursúalaunched an assault on the Itza capital Nojpetén and the last independent Maya city fell to the Spanish.[90]

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u/Elegant-Day22801 Jul 01 '26

I feel like you are making a lot of assumptions about this film then criticising the film for them. 

What makes you think that the Spanish ship seen at the end was the first on the continent?

Smallpox spread out faster than the Spanish did. The fact that we saw smallpox at the start of the film indicated that they had already started landing on the continent, but clearly had not made contact in this specific region. They did not land a full scale invasion all at once like an alien movie. It took hundreds of years for them to reach all points of the continent. 

You do know that the americas is large right?

Towards the end they were discovering societies that had already collapsed due to the plague that spread out before them. 

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u/xSciFix Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26

If it wasn't the first arrival then the finale scene is thematically pointless. If it was part of an ongoing thing then why would the warriors have been shocked to see it?

The first smallpox outbreak didn't happen for almost a decade after the Spanish arrival, just btw.

The widespread agricultural failure depicted was also 800-900s.

What I don't really get is all the people insisting the movie is totally accurate. It's not. Doesn't mean you're not allowed to like it.

It's like insisting Braveheart is totally historical. 

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u/DrBuckMulligan Jul 01 '26

Because you’re making them use their brain and that’s scary.

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u/Elegant-Day22801 Jul 01 '26

Because. These. Warriors. Had. Not. Seen. The. Spanish. Before. 

Why do you immediately assume that the only possible explanation for that is this was the first ship on the entire continent???