Apocalypto. Not really alternate history, but jumbled up enough to be. The film is actually a pretty OK action-adventure chase movie with all the standard Gibsonian fair: noble family man hero, despicable bad guys, decadent ruling classes, blood and vengeance. The Native and Latino actors do an excellent job in Yucatec and it is extremely well photographed. The film has a few really fascinating visual details which ring true about PreColumbian Mayan culture (some demonstrated archaeologically and others reasonable speculation), but the overarching backstory makes no sense. The idea that a small village of independent hunterer-gatherers would be living untouched within a 1-2 day's walk of a major Mayan urban center is ludicrious. Instead of the outlying farming villages, milpa plots, and regional towns which would have dotted the landscape within 10-20 km of the royal city, all connected by well-traveled trails, it looks like the city was just plunked down into a wild jungle with simple forest people just there for the taking. It would have made so much more sense of our victimized heroes were farmers living in a satellite village of a neighboring kingdom, but I guess they would then not have met met Mel's criteria as pure noble eco-innocents. Basically, this movie could have been set in Mexico, Egypt, Scotland, or Africa as the story really had nothing inherently to do with MesoAmerica.
The City (unnamed in the movie) looks a lot like Tikal (a Classic center abandoned by AD900). However, unlike Tikal, this place is within a couple days walk of the ocean and was apparently going strong until the early 16th Century, since the Spanish show up in the penultimate scene and inadvertently save our hero from the last few surviving baddies chasing him. Either alternate history or bad history one way or the other.
In some ways this film is similar to "Quest for Fire". Just like that movie tracked a million years of human evolution in one movie, Apacolypto is adeliberately ahistorical series of scenes in one movie which track several thousand years of Mayan history, just to make the point that nature is good and big cities are nasty places full of decadent people.
The movie is also marred by too much artsy gobledegook about prophesies, haunted seers, jaguars, etc., and the sub-plot involving the hero's pregnant wife trying to survive trapped in a cenote is both hard to swallow and forces the plot into an unrealistically short time frame.
However, Mayanists can't be choosy when it comes to Hollywood. The last MesoAmerican-themed movie, "The Sun Kings" (I think), was made over 40 years ago, starred Yul Brynner (I think) and featured greco-egyptian Mayans escaping from Toltecs by sailing galleys across the Gulf of Mexico to set up a colony somewhere in Texas or Louisiana. Compared to that dreck, Apocalypto is a paragon of historical accuracy.
I'm curious what others think.
The City (unnamed in the movie) looks a lot like Tikal (a Classic center abandoned by AD900). However, unlike Tikal, this place is within a couple days walk of the ocean and was apparently going strong until the early 16th Century, since the Spanish show up in the penultimate scene and inadvertently save our hero from the last few surviving baddies chasing him. Either alternate history or bad history one way or the other.
In some ways this film is similar to "Quest for Fire". Just like that movie tracked a million years of human evolution in one movie, Apacolypto is adeliberately ahistorical series of scenes in one movie which track several thousand years of Mayan history, just to make the point that nature is good and big cities are nasty places full of decadent people.
The movie is also marred by too much artsy gobledegook about prophesies, haunted seers, jaguars, etc., and the sub-plot involving the hero's pregnant wife trying to survive trapped in a cenote is both hard to swallow and forces the plot into an unrealistically short time frame.
However, Mayanists can't be choosy when it comes to Hollywood. The last MesoAmerican-themed movie, "The Sun Kings" (I think), was made over 40 years ago, starred Yul Brynner (I think) and featured greco-egyptian Mayans escaping from Toltecs by sailing galleys across the Gulf of Mexico to set up a colony somewhere in Texas or Louisiana. Compared to that dreck, Apocalypto is a paragon of historical accuracy.
I'm curious what others think.