Director: Mel Gibson
Writers: Mel Gibson, Farhad Safinia
Stars: Gerardo Taracena, Raoul Max Trujillo, Dalia Hernández.
Storyline
In the Maya civilization, a peaceful tribe is brutally attacked by warriors seeking slaves and human beings for sacrifice for their gods. Jaguar Paw hides his pregnant wife and his son in a deep hole nearby their tribe and is captured while fighting with his people. An eclipse spares his life from the sacrifice and later he has to fight to survive and save his beloved family.
User Reviews
Say what you want about Mel Gibson, but he knows how to make an authentically real statement about the human condition. The movie is about civilization and how smaller is better. There are some rain-forest dwelling American natives, somewhere in America where there are jaguars and monkeys. Then there are some "civilized" natives, with a huge society of nobles, serfs, slaves and sacrificial victims who get their hearts torn out and heads chopped off on top of a pyramid, for the appeasement of their gods and for the sake of controlling and entertaining the "citizens." Our noble small villagers of the forest are ultimately hunted down and enslaved by the more organized, and totally vicious, pyramid builders. This is a story of how one of these villagers deals with the horrific trials that his captors heap upon him. The whole movie is in an ancient native language, subtitled in English, and it lends an air of excruciating authenticity to the happenings. One gets the feeling of being a time traveler, as this 500-year-old world seems so real, with every detail of weaponry, cookware, clothing, jewelry, labor practices, buildings, village characters, and sacrificial ceremonies so obviously researched that it made me feel uncomfortably like I was involved in it all. We are constantly getting the crowd's point of view of all the empire's activities and abuse of its captives and underlings. There is a lot to look at here, from God's beautiful nature to man's nightmarish creations, so it deserves to be seen on a big screen.
