Apocalypto

Mel Gibson’s 2006 film opens on a raid in the forest and turns its whole second half into a single chase. Every line is in Yucatec Maya; the Maya scholar Hilario Chi Canul retranslated the dialogue and coached it on set. Gibson wanted non professionals throughout, so casting ran across three continents. Dean Semler shot it on the Panavision Genesis, a digital camera, rather than on film, an unusual choice for a period epic in 2006. It was shot in Mexico, the jungle near Catemaco and the pyramid city on a set built in Veracruz. Name the criticism instead of gesturing at it. Traci Ardren, an anthropologist at the University of Miami writing in Archaeology, objects to the Spanish ships in the last five minutes: the Spanish came roughly three hundred years after the last Maya city was abandoned. Julia Guernsey of the University of Texas called the portrayal offensive to Maya people. It took three Academy Award nominations, for Makeup, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing, and won none. All three are craft categories. A good fit if you will sit through two hours of subtitled Yucatec Maya with no familiar face on screen and a second half that is almost entirely running. Not for you if you came for Maya civilisation; the science and the architecture are absent.