I was disappointed by Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (and I was also disappointed with his apparent drunken rant, but that’s irrelevant to this review), but something about Apocalypto made me want to see it. I read some stuff about it, and prepared myself for a brutal, violent movie.
Turns out, while it was violent and brutal, it wasn’t overly horrific in terms of what you see on the screen.
It IS horrific to think that this is how those peoples lived in their time.

The main focus in Apocalypto is that of Jaguar Paw, played very well by the charismatic newcomer Rudy Youngblood, trying to get away from the Mayan hunters that decimated his village to bring slaves and sacrificial lambs to the Mayan priests and their people. He’s trying to get back to his wife and child, which he hid at the onset of the village attack. His wife is played by Dalia Hernandez, and she is also very good.

There's really not all that much of a plot; it’s mostly a chase flick, and in some ways a revenge flick as the hunters get what’s coming to them. I don’t know much about the Mayans, but they are depicted as religious (superstitious) zealots, and if they really did all that sacrificing, they must have given the Nazis a run for their money. Damn.

I was a little disappointed by this movie, but it’s a good movie over all. The two leads are excellent, and I like the fact that like The Passion, Apocalypto is subtitled and all the dialogue (not that there’s all that much) is spoken in the authentic language of the time and place it portrays, in this case, Yucatec Maya.
There is plenty to appreciate visually, and while the story is kind of one note, the sum of its parts are greater than the whole…