History Buffs: Apocalypto

[Music] hello and welcome history buffs my name is nick hodges and we'll be heading to the jungles of the yucatan peninsula this is apocalypto so for those of you who haven't seen apocalypto this is a film about the incredible mayan civilization and much like the title suggests attempts to explain its downfall and when i first heard about it i was pretty excited hollywood has never really made a film about the maya before so this was something different something unique a historical film bringing to life a long dead civilization that is as alien to me as i'm sure it is to the most of you and then i found out that mel gibson directed it and if you've watched enough of my reviews then he could probably tell that he doesn't exactly have a good track record when it comes to historical movies historians from england will say i am a liar yeah i bet they do [ __ ] however in all fairness to the guy he didn't write the script for either braveheart or the patriot but he did help write the script for this one as well as directed so he has absolutely no excuse for historical inaccuracies i'm about to point out this is apocalypto so at the very beginning of the movie we see an establishing shot of the jungle floor and during the film's promotion it was mentioned that a big chunk of it was shot in southern mexico right where the mayan civilization existed for thousands of years based on location alone this is already off to a good start and then this scene happens where we see a bunch of mayan hunters chasing a tapia at least i think it's a tape here it looks like one but it doesn't really sound like one the thing is real tapias tend to make like this weird wheezing noise or they sound like a mouse farting all i'm saying is that it's kind of strange to me that they had a real tape here but they dubbed it with this noise instead now i am of course nitpicking here but i think this is a good indicator of how the rest of the movie's gonna go anyway after the main character jaguar poor and his mates have killed the tapia they head back to their village a village which looks way too primitive for a mayan settlement i mean seriously it's smack bang in the middle of the jungle the land has not been cultivated whatsoever it's just a bunch of flimsy stick huts surrounded by trees why haven't they been cleared if this is a mayan village then where are their crops of corn and maize why are they growing squash and beans not only were these food groups the basic diet of the mayan commoner but they were also harvested by these villages in order to feed the heavily populated cities meat itself was more of a luxury and only provided a small percentage of their diet but in the movie they're presented as more of a hunter-gatherer society without a basic understanding of agriculture and not to mention they don't even look mayan they look more like one of those isolated native tribes that live deep in the amazon and not the people of the great mayan civilization a real mayan village would look something like this notice how the land has been cleared of dense jungle notice how the huts are more solid and have stone foundations and of course how the women are dressed a mayan woman would be dressed rather modestly they wore skirts and sleeveless like tunics or dresses i mean typically they would look something like this however in apocalypto the women are pretty much butt naked and have their boobies hanging out boobies jigglies giblongas bazooms in my experience people only go to these films to observe the undraped form of the native girls i actually wouldn't be surprised if that was the thinking that greenlit this movie and now some of you may be thinking maybe they're like a primitive non-mayan tribe or something like that uh yeah maybe that excuse could have worked if we didn't see them speaking bloody mayan later in the movie we see them talking to other minds without any problems whatsoever so that argument is completely bollocks gross and actually whilst we're on the subject of the mayan language i will admit that i do appreciate that all the actors in this movie are speaking yucatec maya it's a great way to engage the audience with this period in history however i also believe it's a double-edged sword since it adds a false layer of credibility by having authentic native language in your movie your average audience member who knows nothing about mayan history will think that the rest of the movie has to be authentic too and this is a running theme in apocalypto on the surface it may appear to be mine but more than likely it's probably a pig anyway the next morning jaguar poor wakes up to see some mayan warriors hiding in the jungle getting ready to attack his village and what some of them are wearing is a little bit eccentric it's mostly the main bad guy who's covered with human jaw bones and has i think a jaguar jaw fixed beneath his even if he does the cool which i admit he looks less like a mayan warrior and more like a predator he should be wearing like a big old fat head dress with feathers and his outfit should have like animal skins with a variety of different colors to mark him as a chieftain the rest of his entourage look appropriate however they could do with a bit more pizzazz but whatever fortunately i'm happy to say that their weapons are quite accurate with their wooden clubs fixed with obsidian the only thing i feel is missing is that none of them seem to be carrying shields so the mayan warriors attacked the village without any clear motive other than to collect the villagers for human sacrifices the only question i have is why bother with this lot i mean surely you want to go after other warriors or high born nobles from rival kingdom if you wanted your sacrifices to have that much more meaning to the gods but that's not the case here everyone in the village minus the children are taken as captives and they all head back off into the jungle after a day's worth of traveling they come across other mines cutting down trees showing us that we are approaching civilization as they make their way towards it we see a sick girl cry next to a dead mother and what the [ __ ] does does she have smallpox it looks like smallpox but no no no this movie cannot be that bloody stupid there's no way this can be true let's give apocalypto the benefit of the doubt what exactly are the symptoms of smallpox about two to three days into the illness then the classic rash appears and in its worst forms this takes over the whole of the body with initially pimples and then enormous blisters until the whole of the skin starting with the hands and the face and then spreading down to cover the rest of the body is taken over by the smallpox blisters oh my god that's exactly what she has i mean i know she's early into her illness but let's take a look at her dead mum and compare her blisters with a smallpox victim as you can clearly see it's exactly the sodding same but my question is how the hell can she and her mum have smallpox if the spanish haven't even arrived yet i think the vast majority of us have taken enough basic history to recognize how absolutely [ __ ] this scene is we all know that the europeans introduced smallpox to the new world and the virus killed up to 90 percent of all the indigenous people and yet here she is clear as day with a smallpox virus without any of the mayans having ever laid their eyes on a single white man this leads me to two conclusions either this is one of the worst historical inaccuracies i've ever seen in a movie or mel gibson did a really [ __ ] job of visually communicating to the audience what the disease actually was he could have picked any number of native diseases that existed in that part of the world and yet he picked the one that is most identifiable as smallpox we are through the looking glass here people and we're not even halfway through the movie yet [Music] so after the war party leave the smallpox girl they approached the outskirts of a mayan city and i have to admit that what we do see is actually very interesting and does have some historical relevance first up we see some mayan laborers working in a lime quarry an apocalypto shows the exact process of how the lime powder was made the trees that we saw cut down earlier are used as fuel to heat up these rocks so they can be later pulverized and be turned into this white powder then later in the movie we see that the powder is carted into the city to be turned into this paste and applied to their buildings after the lime quarry scene we finally see some mayan crops however these ones are not fertile at all and have been completely devastated and it seems the failure of these crops are linked to the massive mayan building spree because of the need to make lime powder more trees were being cut down and as a result when the rains would come it would wash away the topsoil of these crops resulting in famine and disease these are all obviously little clues that we are seeing the classic maya collapse by the year 900 all of these classic city kingdoms would forever be abandoned by its people to this very day we still have no definitive answer as to why but it seems that environmental conditions were a major contribution and apocalypto seems to be showing one such example that is historically authentic and wow i'm actually praising mel gibson for getting it right i mean if he keeps it up i'll be more than happy to stop giving him grief really you're trying to tell me that neither of these twits have ever seen a mind city before guys you need to get out more i don't understand this because in the late classic period there are literally hundreds of these cities all over the place if you take a look at a map of the maya world and take into account all of their cities whether they be abandoned or not and the map literally lights up like a christmas tree in fact there were so many that wherever you were you couldn't be more than 12 miles from the nearest city and you can't make the argument that maybe these people happen to live far enough away because the movie clearly shows that it takes two days to walk from the village to the city not only that but the village is located right next to the sodding coast that's prime real estate mate and yet the movie expects me to believe that not once in thousands of years of mayan history that these brain dead morons ever decide to walk more than two freaking days from their village for any of you who like this movie let that thought sink in so the captives are taking through the city and we get a good look at the marketplace and i'm not too stubborn to say that they actually did a pretty good job here the hustle and bustle of trade flowing in is accurate as well as the type of goods they're selling in their stalls there are chili's tortoise shells being sold people weaving and then dyeing the fabrics i'm also happy to finally see some bloody mayan women dress appropriately by wearing the traditional cuipio as the war party approaches the city center we see some of the mayan elite with their crazy outfits and crazy hair now i've tried to research into exactly how they would have looked but the information is kind of scarce the best idea we have is based on pottery figurines and murals to name a few the way their hair is presented in the movie isn't exactly the way how the real maya chose to present themselves in their art but it's close however the makeup is quite accurate they have scarifications just like the real maya and they are wearing jay jewelry although i do have to admit that there does seem to be an overabundance of it simply because jade was usually reserved for the royal families but let's be honest here this inaccuracy is really tame compared to the ones we've already covered as the captives are close to their final destination the women are sold into slavery and the men are painted in blue dye to be prepared for human sacrifice and so here we are the most controversial part of the entire movie where the captives are taken to the top of a massive pyramid and they can see people one after another being sacrificed faster than a factory conveyor belt there are so many historical inaccuracies presented here that they hurt my brain so let's begin by this point the film is clearly established that is set to the classic maya period from the architecture to the massive pyramids and the dense population the city has no kingdom after the maya collapse would ever grow to the size again or build pyramids such as these and the failing crops and the famine are all clues that apocalypto is showing the maya collapse that took place around the year 900 so i want to know is why is the priest sacrificing his victims by extracting the heart minds wouldn't do this until the post-classic period and the reason why is because they were influenced by the aztecs who didn't even exist as a culture yet instead mayans at this time would perform sacrifices in a number of different ways there would be bloodletting for example which was more of a self-inflicted non-lethal sacrifice where you'd piss your tongue and pull a rope through it or a man would pierce his foreskin and drip the blood and some paper they would burn as for human sacrifices the most common way it was done in the classic period would be through decapitation they would fire arrows of their victims or they would throw people down pits or sinkholes called cenotes but another thing that's terribly wrong with this scene is that way too many people are being sacrificed from the bodies piling up at the bottom of the pyramid to the mass grave we see later in the film we could see that hundreds of people have been sacrificed and obviously the reason why is because their crops are failing and they wish to appease the gods now in real life there was a sharp spike in human sacrifice at this time probably because of the drought they suffered and as a desperate last resort they even went as far as to sacrifice their own children however saying all of that there is no archaeological evidence that the maya ever carried out their sacrifices on such a large scale mel gibson is obviously copying all of this from the aztecs who actually did uh archaeologists believe that they sacrificed up to 20 000 people a year on average uh some years they sacrificed even more than that so what's stupid about this movie is that it can't make up its mind about which civilization it wants to be based on is it about the maya or is it about the aztec you can't use traits from both anyway i want to wrap up this review before i burst a blood vessel so when it's jaguar's pau's turn to be sacrificed he becomes the luckiest man on earth when a solar eclipse happens the crowd below are freaking out over what this could possibly mean but what i quite like about this moment is when the priest smiles and looks at the king who nods in acknowledgement this little exchange indicates that not only did they know that this was a solar eclipse but they also knew that was going to happen that very day this is another rare moment from apocalypto which is accurate because the maya were exceptionally gifted in astronomy and they were able to predict the precise moment when solar eclipses happened with this kind of knowledge they were able to control the masses who didn't know about this stuff using it as a sign the priest has officially announced an end to the mass sacrifices but quietly tells the main bad guy to kill the captives anyway the warriors initially decide to use them as target practice until jaguar paul is able to escape but not without killing the leader's son in the process and the rest of the movie is pretty much one giant chase scene from there where the warriors are trying to kill jaguar poor until he decides to go full rambo on them when you're pushed chillin this goes on for quite a while as jaguar poor comes up with inventive ways to kill them off one by one like using a makeshift blowgun out of leaves thorns and frog venom he fights as long as he can until he gets shot by an arrow in the chest jackie or paul survives but is wounded he collapses on the beach near his village only to see [Music] [Applause] [Music] i i can't take it anymore this film goes beyond being historically inaccurate this doesn't make a lick of sense how can apocalypto be both about the classic maya collapse and show the conquistadors arriving 600 years later when the classic maya period officially ended in the year 900 spain was part of an islamic caliphate it didn't even exist as a country and yet i'm looking at what i can only describe as time traveling conquistadors please explain it to me anybody how this is possible i'll take any scenario if that helps explain how 16th century conquistadors managed to travel back 600 years into the past you see i have one explanation for all of this this could be an alternate timeline perhaps mel gibson is a fan of alternate history maybe this is a timeline where we go back millennia to explain how the spanish could have arrived centuries earlier to an entirely different continent due to circumstances that by this time didn't actually exist in this alternate scenario that mel gibson obviously crafted with his great wisdom we go to 8th century hispania which is currently under the occupation of the islamic moors the only spanish kingdoms that exist at this time are in the north and are fighting a constant battle against the muslims this alternate reconquista simply takes place centuries before it did in our timeline or before any realistic event in this alternate scenario the christian kingdom simply throw all their rivalries competition and hatred for one another that realistically undermined the reconquista by centuries out the window and somehow drove the muslims off after just two centuries of rule how did they do this i don't know alien space bats after somehow kicking out the moors a full six centuries earlier than our timeline that means hispania is unified yay before the crusades before the fall of constantinople and before the normans even invade britain huh so what now well for this mel gibson's scenario to work alien space bats once again do their magic and not only form the kingdoms of aragon and castile which took centuries in our timeline to form by the way but also united them to create the spanish empire flag and all the spanish then thought hey even though the byzantines still exist let's find a harder trade route and they set sail for the open ocean surely thinking they were going to die well that that's my explanation cody stop right there mate you're giving this movie way too much credit mate there's no point in trying to explain the scene mel gibson doesn't care he picks and chooses what he wants from history just so he can have a chase sequence in the jungle oh why would he do that because he's [ __ ] mel gibson cody this troglody couldn't give a monkey's fart about history if this movie takes place in 1511 why show the maya collapse those environmental problems didn't even exist in 1511 and don't you dare say it's just a movie he didn't have to make a historical movie cody if he wanted total freedom to do whatever he wanted he could have just done a james cameron and have all the mayans played by giant smurfs that i would accept what i won't accept is a film that fuses two different civilizations two different time periods 600 years it would be like the equivalent of showing the battle of agincourt in 1415 while king henry [ __ ] tweets about it so you don't really like it then no cody i didn't much care for it but thank you for presenting a scenario that actually offered some explanation ironically it was based on more real history than this movie was well to sum everything up apocalypto is precisely the reason why i hate mel gibson's historical movie so much because bottom line they make people stupid because they buy into his [ __ ] it's a sad fact with the majority of people these days get their history from historical movies they watch the film and think oh that's how it was oh that's what it was like so filmmakers like mel gibson get away with it and he's able to get away with so much with apocalypta because at the end of the day it's a movie about indians so who gives a [ __ ] about misrepresenting them am i right as long as it fits his agenda just take a look at the opening points of the film that says it all a great civilization is not conquered from without until has destroyed itself from within her yeah uh will durant said that about the decline of the roman empire so how does that apply here are you suggesting that it was the maya's fault that got conquered by the spanish because of what their ancestors did 600 years before how do the two connect mate i don't see it what does one have to do the other what link is there between the classic maya and the post-classic maya could it be the human sacrifices well we already just established how much of it you exaggerated in this movie but regardless of how horrific we see human sacrifices today it still has bugger all to do with how civilization thrives and falls so i'll say this to mel gibson you started your movie with a quote from will durant so i'm going to end my review about your movie with a more appropriate quote from alfred tennyson [Music] well that about wraps it up my name is nick hodges and thanks for watching history buffs and remember if you like the show help the channel grow if you wish to support history buffs you can now do so at patreon and as always let me know in the comment section what you thought about apocalypto and of course what historical movie should i review next in the meantime check out the history bus twitter and facebook pages for new updates until then i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: undefined

Views: 4,682,353

Rating: 4.1271591 out of 5

Keywords: Apocalypto, History Buffs, Historically accurate, Historically Innacurate, Maya, Mayan, Yucatec Penninsula, Historical accuracies, Historical innacuracies, Review, Dr.Lia Tsesmeli

Id: U5pBZKj1VnA

Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 02 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/captain_leddy]

I don't feel I can trust his research, he often seem like a sofa-historian where he doesn't put as much effort into researching as he tries to imply he does. I've seen others have similar complaints about it like in his video on "Saving Private Ryan", and myself when I noticed errors with his history in the video on "Vikings".

Here I couldn't stomach watching it all, he quickly ends up being way to emotional and it rather seems he is caught up more in Mel Gibson than the movie's historical accuracy, especially when he starts off by complaining on a non-history issue like the sound a tapir makes.

I'd love a channel like this if I could find it as credible as I do with a channel like Veritasium.

[u/[deleted]]

His worst review by far. Extremely disappointing.

[u/say-something-nice]

From the wiki page of apoctalypto "Set in pre-Columbian Yucatan and Guatemala around the year 1511"

So he just railed on a film without ever seeing what time period the film intended on portraying and decided to "guess the period" based on....What?

So that pretty much justifies most his complaints. Small pox? check the spanish are in america.

never seen a stone building? very few cities remained after the collapse 600 years ago but some still remained.

Why are they copying the aztec sacrifices? because the aztec did exist and as he stated himself the mayans did copy them in this period.

Spanish? this is literally set on the exact year that the spanish made contact

[u/I_suck_at_mostthings]

Does the reviewer think that this movie is depicting an actual historical event? That wasn't the point of the film.

[u/raresaturn]

This guy seems like a self-righteous dick

[u/kaisermatias]

/u/badhistory had a (now-deleted) user give a thorough, while still enjoyable, review of the historicity of the film a few years back, and actually by someone who is familiar with the topic:

• Apocalypto Part 1: Happy Indians in Blissful Ignorance

• Apocalypto Part 2: Big City Blues

• Apocalypto Part 3: Saving the Indians from Themselves

[u/urgehal666]

I always felt Apocalypto depicted the Aztecs in a Mayan setting. As the videos pointed out, the Mayans rarely sacrificed people while the Aztecs did tens of thousands every year.

I don't think that really matters here though, the movie is clearly trying to relay a specific message and I think it does so quite well. Like with most great movies, you have to take it with a grain of salt.

[u/I_suck_at_mostthings]

He throws a bitchfit about the smallpox but completely ignores the prophecy the girl gives? The scene is supposed to feel completely surreal. Who's to say that some Spanish haven't already arrived and have made their way through some of the jungle?

Who's to say that every single Mayan village looks identical?

This review is pretty bad, IMO

[u/Mordkillius]

The tone of the movie suggests that this was an outlying tribe that had never encountered their captors. That maybe it was a small tribe of hunters/gatherers. That's how I saw it