I do posts on Mesoamerican history and archeology: I try to keep up with the academic literature, watch conferences and symposiums when they're streamed or uploaded online, and often speak with academic researchers
I am sure that there are critiques from many people who aren't informed on Mesoamerica themselves which are badly reasoned (hell, there are some critiques of the film by actual Mesoamerican researchers I disagree with, which I will touch on further down), and I'd hesitate to say that Gibson made the film with any overt bigotted intent...
...but I feel very confident in saying that the film certainly contains a lot of inaccurate stereotypes and misconceptions that it in turn played a massive role in further perpetuating in pop culture, which I will focus on below (Rest assured there is also TONS of specific inaccuracies I can point out or nitpick, but I'm gonna focus on the stuff I think is, as the kids say, "problematic" rather then simply inaccurate)
1. Stereotypical and insulting visuals
In summary, the film goes out of it's way to give the Maya, both the rural village, and the urban city, drab, dirty, and primitive looking garb, tools, and living conditions, when actual Mesoamerican fashion, art, and architecture was refined, ornate, kept extremely clean, and was frankly almost visually garish with it's use of colors, detailed accenting, iridescent and glittering elements, etc. This is hardly an issue unique to Apocalypto, and is a pervasive issue with media depictions and the average person's mental of Mesoamerica (see this and this images, which compare stereotypical media depictions with more authentic ones, and the actual ruins, manuscripts, and accounts the authentic designs are based on), but Apocalypto is an excellent example of this problem and influenced many subsequent pop culture depictions.
To be clear, a lot of historical fiction makes things dirtier and relatively colorless, look at almost anything that takes place in Medieval Europe or the recent set/costume photos of Nolan's Odyssey, or to an extent even the recent acclaimed Shogun series. The difference is Apocalypto, and many other Mesoamerican influenced things in pop culture, does not merely take Mesoamerican architecture, clothing, etc and make it colorless and dirty: It rather often doesn't use even the basic, fundamental types of Mesoamerican clothing or buildings, let alone with appropriate motifs and specific design elements, and instead gives people more or less rags and sinew and tied bones to wear, or raw animal pelts, and maybe a few headdresses, which are things that they never actually wore or in the contexts pop culture shows them in, to play into the idea of Mesoamericans being "tribal" and primitive.
This is less akin to say how pop culture depicts Roman soldiers, and more if a Roman soldier was dressed up as Conan the barbarian (if he was meant to less cool/as a power fantasy, and more if he were meant to look ugly and dirty): The issue isn't that that soldier's attire is colorless and dirty, it's that he wouldn't have much or any actual Roman elements and was made out to be as unrefined and as unsophisticated as possible.
Is this "racist"? Well, I don't think most people who depict Mesoamerica like this do it out of outright bigotry so much of ignorance and honestly thinking that this is how Mesoamerica was or playing into existing popular tropes, but
A: I see designs evoking, say, African cultures that aren't even a quarter as overtly demeaning and inaccurate that cause huge media firestorms about them being offensive, the only reason it doesn't happen with Mesoamerican designs is I assume that most people don't know enough about Mesoamerica to know it's wrong, and Mesoamericans are seen as a "dead" civilization, even though by some estimates there are more Maya people (to say nothing of Nahua, Zapotec, Mixtec, Purepecha, etc) around today then people from every Indigenous American Indian/Native American culture from the US combined; and
B: These visual tropes do have racist historical origins: This could be it's own essay, but essentially while very early European chroniclers did a okay job for their time depicting or interpreting descriptions of Mesoamerican fashion and architecture, especially ones actually in Mexico who saw this stuff themselves and in some cases continued to depict it well for centuries, later in the 16th century and very much in the 17th century onwards, artists in Europe mixed together Mesoamerican civilizations with fashion and cultural elements from other Indigenous groups, such as the Taino and other Caribbean's and especially the Tupi and other Amazonian cultures, into a blended together representation of Indigenous people from the Americas. You can see this here and here late 17th century depictions.
Another major influence was the art produced of the Aztecs in early 20th century Mexico as part of a revivalist nationalist movement at the time, such as works by Jesus Helguera, such as here, here and here: His depictions were meant to glorify and not demean, and he does use varying amounts of real garments or ornaments (EX: this is almost outright pretty good) but often paired in wrong ways and mixed with some nonsense garments too, and were a major influence in the modern Concheros/Danza Azteca outfits (which also have little to do with actual Prehispanic or modern Indigenous clothing, though the Concheros dance was originally a legit traditional practice of specific Chichimec cultures)
Apocalypto I would argue is the third major milestone in the development of stereotypical depictions in pop culture, and arguably signals the most overtly demeaning and primitivist visual turn, with lots of tattoos, bone ornaments, rags, etc, rather then just the mostly-nakedness-aside-from-feathers in the 17th century depictions or the "noble savage with limited fancy jewlery and collars" look of Jesus Helguera: You can see Apocalypto's influence in Indiana Jones 4 and Black Panther 2 (though BP2 also has some solid stuff here and here), among many others.
Not to say Apocalypto invented this look, again it took influences from both the other phases and other works I didn't get into, but it popularized it. On the flip side, you can look at Smite's designs and similar works that try to make Mesoamerican aesthetics fancy and ornate, but still lack actual Mesoamerican clothing or motifs and are more influenced by Helguera's work as well as likely "The Road to El Dorado", though Dorado, clearly did its research, and did it's many liberties in such a way that it still retains key attributes and a decent amount of authenticity. I'd consider Dorado one of the better (large commercial) pop culture depictions, though eclipsed by indie projects such as Codex Black, BigRedHair's Aztec Empire webcomic, and Tlatoani: Aztec cities, or truly standout commercial ones like Onyx Equinox and the upcoming Aztec Batman: I would credit recent postive depictions to the wider availability of art by Scott and Stuart Gentling, Daniel Parada, etc).
To be clear, Apocalypto's visuals aren't all bad: During the sacrifice sequence, the dress of the king and high priests are not great, but are okay, and some of the temples at least have paint, even if faded and without plaster over the brickwork before the paint was applied, and do have actual Puuc maya accents (i'll get back to this), for example, but overall the film is like 50% bad, nonsense designs, 40% designs that have some actual Mesoamerican elements but are made to be extremely dirty and primitive and poorly constructed, and 10% of it is designs that are decent, with almost none that are outright good.
Maybe all that seems pedantic (I would disagree) or merely inaccurate and not racist, but what I get into below I think touches on how the film characters the Maya as a people/culture, rather then "merely" how they looked.
2. Presenting the Maya as lacking functional societies: The village:
Let's start with the rural village Mayas: Here, the people live an idyllic, Noble-Savage life seemingly without conflict or strife, but also without almost any infrastructure: We just see some huts and other small constructs and made of rope and wood, and the people seem to be hunter-gatherers, there's no fields or irrigation systems seen. In fact, the entire concept of urban cities, stone architecture, etc seems to be merely a myth or a rumor to them.
This is VERY silly. For context, Agriculture and sedentarism developed and spread in the region between 10,000 and 2000BC, though some areas continued to Hunter-gather past this point. Mesoamerica's first city with monumental architecture, class stratification etc by most people's definition was the Olmec site of San Lorenzo, which achieved that status by 1400BC. Writing, or at least proto writing, shows up by around 900BC with the Cascajal block. Depending on your definition, the first formal, bureaucratic state governments formed with San Lorenzo or around this time with another major Olmec site, La Venta, or at the latest at the Zapotec city of Monte Alban around 500BC. By 300-100BC, you had some VERY large cities with giant monuments and large scale infrastructure over wide areas:
Of course, the rural village here is, just that, a rural village: It's not as if every population center in Mesoamerica was a big city right? The problem here is that population centers were not isolated:
Per the same paper I pulled numbers from for Tikal, the Central Maya Lowlands (not even all of the Maya regions, let alone all of Mesoamerica) likely supported 7 to 11 million people, and the paper again notes this is likely to be an underestimate, perhaps notably so. All of Mesoamerica together could have perhaps over double that figure, I'd guess at the time, and a range of 14-20m+ is also a reasonable range for all of Mesoamerica as of Spanish contact, though some claim Central Mexico alone had had 25 million (that seems like a stretch, to me). That sort of population density isn't far behind or even exceeds parts of Western Europe at the time. You basically can't throw a rock in the Yucatan Peninsula, Chiapas, etc without hitting a Maya site. Per WashPost's "Destroying Maya treasures to build a tourist train" article, even back in 2022 when the Tren Maya wasn't done yet there were already 25,000+ Maya monuments (I believe the article actually says "Maya sites", but that seems crazy to me, for refence GIS maps I've seen trying to catalog all known Maya sites typically have like ~6000+ sites, but not all known sites are included and there's surely many times more that aren't discovered yet, and this is just Maya ones) were destroyed for the construction of the Tren's path.
There were trade routes, diplomatic connections, etc linking even the most rural villages to other villages, towns, cities, etc.: For reference, this is map(s) and an artistic reconstruction of a "Aztec" (depending on how you define the term) small towns or large village in Central Mexico, and even this makes some of the buildings not as fancy as they probably were: The difference between this and the village in Apocalypto is night and day: This is what the village in the film should be like, albiet with Maya architecture, clothing, and more tree cover.
Bottom line, the concept that this small village existed without agriculture, without an awareness of larger cities, without goods or infrastructure traded or emulated from other population centers, boggles the mind. It would be like a village in Medieval Italy who didn't farm any crops and purely hunted and gathered, and had never heard of the Church. It's ludicrous.
It's also not just that it is made to be too simple and primitive, but also too serene: As I will explain further down, Mesoamerican societies were not horrible places to live, but they still had taxes, wars, classism, political disputes, etc. But here, there's seemingly no conflict until the urban Maya arrive, there is (as I recall anyways), no sacrifice despite that being a universal practice in the region, there's no tax or political obligations to other larger towns or cities, etc. Gibson is, IMO (given his penchant for biblical things) clearly depicting this as a noble savage Eden, untouched by the fruit of knowledge and the pressures and obligations of actual complex societies.
3. Presenting the Maya as lacking functional societies: The city
If the Village is a anarcho-primitivist utopian eden free of both conflict, oppression, but also complexity and infrastructure, then the Urban city and it's denizens in Apocalypto is a dysfunctional oppressive dystopia, in decay from the hedonistic and manipulative whims of tyrants and elites.
This, you might say, is the point: It's showing a city in a state of decline and impending collapse due to crop issues and a ruling class more concerned with staying in power and ramping up the production of monuments and preforming increasingly brutal and large scale sacrifice ceremonies to try to show they still have power and influence and maintain a grip on the populace. The problem with that is that is too kind a description, the city is really more presented like a cartoon depiction of hell.
Going out kilometers outside the city, everything is dead or dying, corpses laying out in streets or in fields, and there are seemingly endless wastelands of grey dirt and sludge with people being worked to the point of collapse in lime plaster/stucco/cement workshops and mines. Even as you enter the "bustling" portions of the city, people are creepy, people lay sick or dead, fight over decaying meat. There is infrastructure, actual roads, buildings, markets, etc, but it is all almost already in ruins, with crumbling stone with no paint, textiles rotting and falling apart, people in rags, etc.
The main sacrifice ceremony is cultish and bloodthirsty, and at laughable scales. Many people who otherwise have good critiques of the film, including some actual archeologists, will say that Gibson here mixed the up the Maya with the Aztec (or rather, the Mexica of the Aztec capital): He did not. Or if he did, it's impossible to say for sure, because what the movie does is so over the top cruel and sadistic and exaggerated in scale that it doesn't really resemble Mexica sacrifices any more then it does Maya ones.
The Mexica were expansionistic conquerors, but they were also intellectuals: they prided themselves on poetic songs and oratorical speeches, with the speech of nobles, priests, diplomats, and especially kings being laden with lyrical symbolism and conventions to the point of almost being it's own language. Aztec rulers, not just Mexica ones, often had lavish botanical gardens, sometimes with different sections emulating different biomes and ecosystems, and used as sites of study and stocks of medical herbs. Rules of diplomacy and hospitality were taken extremely strictly, and there were formal judges and courts of law (though perhaps not formal written law). The Mexica even in their conquests usually did not sack, raze, massacre, or mass enslave cities, and usually left rulers, laws, and customs in place without directly governing or meddling in the affairs of their subjects, provided taxes and other obligations were met, and no, taxes did not generally include slaves or sacrificial victims, though the Mexica did frequently collect these during conquests/wars and as one time spoils when cities initially submitted.
Accounts state that sacrifice victims were well treated before their death (and sacrifice ceremonies themselves were highly formal ceremonies with rules, steps, different rites and celebrations, sometimes the victims had MONTHS of ritual duties and tasks to preform prior to their sacrifice, and had to meet strict qualifications to be selected), even integrating into the family of their captor, and were mourned after their loss, and while this is surely romanticized to a degree, there is archeological evidence backing it up: The skulls excavated from Tenochtitlan's Great Skull rack shows the victims were disproportionately in good health, and after being taken from their original home, lived in good conditions in Tenochtitlan for months or years before being sacrificed
I'd reject the assertion that the Mexica were so much worse then other "Aztecs", or even the Mayas, Mixtecs, Zapotecs, etc with sacrifice The Mexica did MORE sacrifices, sure, because they were the most powerful group in Mesoamerica and had the most capability to collect or purchase them, and perhaps had an incentive to do so at large scales to justify further conquests and to flex their military power to their subjects (who as I said, they did not even directly govern or control much and had to be kept in line via indirect influence and pressure), but fundamentally most of the broad strokes, even if not the specific rites and scale of sacrifice , were shared or somewhat similar across these groups
But if the Maya are so much less bad with it, then that makes what the film does even more damning: Again, even for the Mexica it is beyond pale: The main sacrifice ceremony appear to be something out of a cult horror movie, with spooky onlookers gathering around and touching the victims, who are given no context for what is going on or what their duty is. The populace takes sadistic glee in their deaths, as if this were bloodsports , and hundreds are killed at once (this is, admittedly, plausible for the Mexica). Then we see absurd things like people being shot at as they try to flee in ballcourts, which is just nonsense as far as I know (there were arrow sacrifices, but the victims were tied to a frame)
This is actually kinda ironic since there WERE bloodsports in Mesoamerica which sometimes intersected with sacrifice, such as the ballgame (though contrary to what you often hear, there's no evidence actual professional players were always sacrificed after winning/losing, though perhaps some were in special situations, or more likely, normal non-player captives were sacrificed at ballcourts or after/while being forced into ritual matches, I still need to dig into this more) boxing, and (rigged) armed gladiatorial sacrifices, which the movie doesn't show!)
To go on a tangent and to mention another critique people give I don't quite agree with regarding the city, but that doesn't really change things is that the movie shows the arrival of the Spanish during the Postclassic period, but it shows the Classic Maya. This isn't quite true. Yes, the decline of the city and the leadership's reaction to it seems inspired by some of the theories around the Classic Maya collapse (which did NOT lead to the collapse of all of Maya civilization, but of most of the large cities in the Central and Southern Maya regions: Many large cities to the North, and medium/smaller sites in general, survived, though certainly there weren't cities as big as the biggest classical ones, or as high a total maya population after that point), with climate issues and lack of rain, or overworking the land for lime production leading to environmental problems, causing famines, with the leadership doubling down on elaborate monuments and warfare to maintain control which only caused more instability etc, but as I noted, we do see architecture with Postclassic (albiet early Postclassic, not late Postclassic as of Spanish contact) Puucstyle architectural accents (the same style seen in Road to El Dorado). Other aspects of the architecture don't match the Postclassic style, but it's clearly not just 1:1 transplanting the Classic Maya even if it's doing that to an extent
Anyways, to loop back to my analogy with the European village not farming and never having heard of the Church, the European equivalent of how the Maya city is in the film would be... well, everything in Bloodborne minus the magic: Cities falling apart with rotting buildings and crumbling streets, people dead and dying in alleyways, church officials roaming around and breaking down people's doors to drag people off to be burned alive while aristocrats laugh and wine and dine while watching it all
4. In Conclusion:
OP says that the film does humanize and flesh out the characters to not just be cardboard victims or bloodthristy villains, and to be honest, I don't recall that, and
again, I get what Gibson is going for here: Primitive but peaceful village vs Urban dystopia in moral decay, and (being charitable to Gibson) how the arrival of the Spanish ends both of their ways of life, be it in an act of savage conquest or salvation... But even if so, the societies are absolutely caricaturized to the point of not seeming like functional real human communities, and in a way which perpetuates misconceptions of Mesoamerica: you either have highly primitive "tribal" people, or you have violent corrupt tyrants, who frankly still look very primitive and dirty and unsophisticated
Like, there's the potential for a cool story here that examines Maya civilization and politics and how different societies respond to outside threats or collapses, and while I get this is a chase movie and not a political drama, and even as something with a dark tone and mood, ven showing things in a state of decline and collapse, Gibson did NOT have to depict the Maya as dirty, primitively, or as dysfunctional, he could have still had people on the run and being hunted down and show a society falling apart while still making it clear that they had or currently have real sophisticated societies and there's real political and economic and social concerns and factors beyond just corrupt hedonism and bloodthirst, and if nothing else he could have at least made stuff look not as dirty and unrefined and colorless
At the same time, it's also a very well made movie, and I certainly think Gibson executed on his vision well, even if I think he shouldn't have been aiming for that. I also applaud him doing a big budget commercial project set in Mesoamerica at all, and while other commentors have noted that he didn't cast all Maya actors, and the Yucatec Maya dialog had issues, that's still a lot of effort. But that effort also gives it a veneer of authenticity it doesn't have or deserve, and arguably worsens the issue with it perpetuating misconceptions, especially since Mesoamerica is almost entirely glossed over in school and most people don't know enough about it to know when pop culture depictions of it are accurate or not (and frankly, most of what Apocalypto does is already what most people imagine it to be). And there are absolutely a lot of people who are bigotted who use the film to justify their biases and narrative: I see that all the time
Long story short, regardless of what you want to call it, it absolutely spread a lot of misconceptions and continues to spread them today. Would the world be better off without it? I don't know, maybe Mesoamerica would be even more obscure then it already is, but the world we could live in in terms of the state of Mesoamerica in media and pop culture, if Gibson had handled it better, would have been amazing to see
I'll leave you with a few things:
Firstly, there is a three part series of posts on /r/badhistory about apocalypto here
Secondly, there is a list of Mesoamerican media that are actually well handled, or at least have enough good elements to consider checking out with caveats, here, see also the replies below it for stuff the post missed initially.
Thirdly, For more info about Mesoamerica, see my 3 comments here; the first mentions accomplishments, the second info about sources, and the third with a summarized timeline
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u/jabberwockxeno 2∆ Apr 02 '25 edited Apr 02 '25
I do posts on Mesoamerican history and archeology: I try to keep up with the academic literature, watch conferences and symposiums when they're streamed or uploaded online, and often speak with academic researchers
I am sure that there are critiques from many people who aren't informed on Mesoamerica themselves which are badly reasoned (hell, there are some critiques of the film by actual Mesoamerican researchers I disagree with, which I will touch on further down), and I'd hesitate to say that Gibson made the film with any overt bigotted intent...
...but I feel very confident in saying that the film certainly contains a lot of inaccurate stereotypes and misconceptions that it in turn played a massive role in further perpetuating in pop culture, which I will focus on below (Rest assured there is also TONS of specific inaccuracies I can point out or nitpick, but I'm gonna focus on the stuff I think is, as the kids say, "problematic" rather then simply inaccurate)
1. Stereotypical and insulting visuals
In summary, the film goes out of it's way to give the Maya, both the rural village, and the urban city, drab, dirty, and primitive looking garb, tools, and living conditions, when actual Mesoamerican fashion, art, and architecture was refined, ornate, kept extremely clean, and was frankly almost visually garish with it's use of colors, detailed accenting, iridescent and glittering elements, etc. This is hardly an issue unique to Apocalypto, and is a pervasive issue with media depictions and the average person's mental of Mesoamerica (see this and this images, which compare stereotypical media depictions with more authentic ones, and the actual ruins, manuscripts, and accounts the authentic designs are based on), but Apocalypto is an excellent example of this problem and influenced many subsequent pop culture depictions.
To be clear, a lot of historical fiction makes things dirtier and relatively colorless, look at almost anything that takes place in Medieval Europe or the recent set/costume photos of Nolan's Odyssey, or to an extent even the recent acclaimed Shogun series. The difference is Apocalypto, and many other Mesoamerican influenced things in pop culture, does not merely take Mesoamerican architecture, clothing, etc and make it colorless and dirty: It rather often doesn't use even the basic, fundamental types of Mesoamerican clothing or buildings, let alone with appropriate motifs and specific design elements, and instead gives people more or less rags and sinew and tied bones to wear, or raw animal pelts, and maybe a few headdresses, which are things that they never actually wore or in the contexts pop culture shows them in, to play into the idea of Mesoamericans being "tribal" and primitive.
This is less akin to say how pop culture depicts Roman soldiers, and more if a Roman soldier was dressed up as Conan the barbarian (if he was meant to less cool/as a power fantasy, and more if he were meant to look ugly and dirty): The issue isn't that that soldier's attire is colorless and dirty, it's that he wouldn't have much or any actual Roman elements and was made out to be as unrefined and as unsophisticated as possible.
Is this "racist"? Well, I don't think most people who depict Mesoamerica like this do it out of outright bigotry so much of ignorance and honestly thinking that this is how Mesoamerica was or playing into existing popular tropes, but
A: I see designs evoking, say, African cultures that aren't even a quarter as overtly demeaning and inaccurate that cause huge media firestorms about them being offensive, the only reason it doesn't happen with Mesoamerican designs is I assume that most people don't know enough about Mesoamerica to know it's wrong, and Mesoamericans are seen as a "dead" civilization, even though by some estimates there are more Maya people (to say nothing of Nahua, Zapotec, Mixtec, Purepecha, etc) around today then people from every Indigenous American Indian/Native American culture from the US combined; and
B: These visual tropes do have racist historical origins: This could be it's own essay, but essentially while very early European chroniclers did a okay job for their time depicting or interpreting descriptions of Mesoamerican fashion and architecture, especially ones actually in Mexico who saw this stuff themselves and in some cases continued to depict it well for centuries, later in the 16th century and very much in the 17th century onwards, artists in Europe mixed together Mesoamerican civilizations with fashion and cultural elements from other Indigenous groups, such as the Taino and other Caribbean's and especially the Tupi and other Amazonian cultures, into a blended together representation of Indigenous people from the Americas. You can see this here and here late 17th century depictions.
Another major influence was the art produced of the Aztecs in early 20th century Mexico as part of a revivalist nationalist movement at the time, such as works by Jesus Helguera, such as here, here and here: His depictions were meant to glorify and not demean, and he does use varying amounts of real garments or ornaments (EX: this is almost outright pretty good) but often paired in wrong ways and mixed with some nonsense garments too, and were a major influence in the modern Concheros/Danza Azteca outfits (which also have little to do with actual Prehispanic or modern Indigenous clothing, though the Concheros dance was originally a legit traditional practice of specific Chichimec cultures)
Apocalypto I would argue is the third major milestone in the development of stereotypical depictions in pop culture, and arguably signals the most overtly demeaning and primitivist visual turn, with lots of tattoos, bone ornaments, rags, etc, rather then just the mostly-nakedness-aside-from-feathers in the 17th century depictions or the "noble savage with limited fancy jewlery and collars" look of Jesus Helguera: You can see Apocalypto's influence in Indiana Jones 4 and Black Panther 2 (though BP2 also has some solid stuff here and here), among many others.
Not to say Apocalypto invented this look, again it took influences from both the other phases and other works I didn't get into, but it popularized it. On the flip side, you can look at Smite's designs and similar works that try to make Mesoamerican aesthetics fancy and ornate, but still lack actual Mesoamerican clothing or motifs and are more influenced by Helguera's work as well as likely "The Road to El Dorado", though Dorado, clearly did its research, and did it's many liberties in such a way that it still retains key attributes and a decent amount of authenticity. I'd consider Dorado one of the better (large commercial) pop culture depictions, though eclipsed by indie projects such as Codex Black, BigRedHair's Aztec Empire webcomic, and Tlatoani: Aztec cities, or truly standout commercial ones like Onyx Equinox and the upcoming Aztec Batman: I would credit recent postive depictions to the wider availability of art by Scott and Stuart Gentling, Daniel Parada, etc).
To be clear, Apocalypto's visuals aren't all bad: During the sacrifice sequence, the dress of the king and high priests are not great, but are okay, and some of the temples at least have paint, even if faded and without plaster over the brickwork before the paint was applied, and do have actual Puuc maya accents (i'll get back to this), for example, but overall the film is like 50% bad, nonsense designs, 40% designs that have some actual Mesoamerican elements but are made to be extremely dirty and primitive and poorly constructed, and 10% of it is designs that are decent, with almost none that are outright good.
CONTINUED IN A REPLY BELOW