Mel Gibson is the worst thing that's happened to indigenous populations since the arrival of the Spanish.

My first reaction was to the extraordinary, gratuitous violence. And the ending with the arrival of the Spanish (conquistadors) underscored the film's message that this culture is doomed because of its own brutality. The implied message is that it's Christianity that saves these brutal savages. I think that's part of Gibson's agenda, sort of, "We got the Jews last time (in 'The Passion of the Christ'), now we'll get the Maya." And to highlight that point there's a lot of really offensive racial stereotyping. They're shown as these extremely barbaric people, when in fact, the Maya were a very sophisticated culture....

The film presents an inaccurate hodge-podge of architecture. Some of it looked like Tikal Classic Maya, 800 A.D. Some looked Puuc, which is closer to 1000 or 1100 A.D. These are very different regions. It's like the difference between Texas and Delaware. It also looked like they were borrowing from El Mirador, this Pre-Classic metropolis that flourished around the year 0 A.D. It would be as though somebody did a movie on our American culture and they had Madonna and Marilyn Monroe riding in a car together, or they had a meeting of George Bush, Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington because why not condense a couple hundred or a couple thousand years? We would be appalled. We take our culture seriously. We demand historical specificity, something completely lacking here. Gibson had a responsibility to know better. He was consulting experts who should have told him.

And from the village voice:

Maybe the Mayans really did bounce human heads down the steps of their pyramids but, being as their civilization collapsed hundreds of years before the Spanish conquest, how would we know? "A lot of it, story-wise, I just made up," Gibson confessed to the Mexican junketeers who visited his set last year.

I know I'm an art nerd but this stuff really bugs me. I think with the kind of reach that american movies have, they have an obligation to at least be somewhat historically accurate and racially sensitive. Besides, way too many americans take their history lessons from movies and tv shows for it to be defended as "just entertainment." Movies like this should at least come with a quick reference book of "the truth according to history" - as in "Q: Hey, remember all those stupid savages? A: They weren't stupid, and invented, by 250 A.D. at the latest, a fully functional, phonetic writing system. Scribes recorded sophisticated texts containing religious, astronomical, and very likely literary, historical, and even medical content - in other words, an entire system of human thought - in bark-paper books, called codices." (See "No Maya Libraries in Apocalypto")