Why disguise a C-level slasher flick as an historical epic? If your true calling as a director is directing films that are thin on plot and gratuitously violent, why not just direct The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Deux? <br /><br />This film was marketed as a lavish historical epic chronicling the last days of the Mayan civilization, and one would expect to see a film that had something to say about decadence and political corruption. Hardly a new theme, but if done properly it could have made for an entertaining film. <br /><br />Unfortunately Mel Gibson fails to execute even this minor task. As in Braveheart, which WAS an entertaining film, Gibson paints his characters in black or white. They are two-dimensional "good guys" or "bad guys." In Braveheart, the English and their Scottish co-conspirators are Eeeeeevil, as are the Mayan elite in Apocalypto who are practically drooling blood from their grinning mouths. This is called pulp, which when treated by someone with an ounce of wit (i.e. Tarantino), is fair game. However, Mel Gibson isn't witty but painfully earnest, and thus his violent formula is disturbing rather than entertaining. <br /><br />I won't even address this film's glaring historical inaccuracies, other than to say that Hollywood rarely delivers in this regard and one no longer expects it to.<br /><br />This convoluted, meandering film was either one of three things: 1. A failed epic in love with its own pornographic violence. There was no point to the violence as there was no point to the film. 2. A subversive propaganda tool which painted the Mayans as bloodthirsty savages whose own wrongdoing earned them their downfall. The final scene showed the arrival of the Europeans, which we know spelled a new world order for Mayans who had so suffered under their own leaders' excesses. 3. A film whose only point is to say that violence is pointless and inescapable. I say this in light of the final scene in which the two mains have escaped the ruin of the city, and instinctively also veer away from the approaching Europeans. They decide to "go to the forest" in hopes of living out their lives in peace, away from the destructiveness of all civilization. The point in this case, is very bleak, since we can assume that they won't be able to escape no matter how far they run, and will likely perish from smallpox or some other disease within a few years. Or they will escape and become the descendants of generations of Maya leading into today.<br /><br />But who knows what Mel Gibson is attempting to say with this picture? I certainly don't. I base my one-star rating on guesses 1. and 2. I suppose if his motivations are more in tune with 3., then we would have at least something of a theme, and as such my rating could go up to 5. or 6. But I really will never know because if he is in fact making a point such as the one I have guessed at in 3., he fails in his utter vagueness and leaves us with a film that is ultimately disappointing, if not entirely offensive!