But he doesn't because he wants you to know that he can make the old tricks work by investing something new in them, by marrying the instincts of a commercial movie-maker with a willingness to take the kind of risks the marketplace rarely tolerates. It's a moment verging on parody - or it would be if Gibson relaxed the tension long enough to let you think about it. Roped together on a forced march to the city, Jaguar Paw and the other villagers stumble on a mountain pass and are left dangling from the cliff's edge. Gibson acknowledges as much with a cliffhanging stunt. Apocalypto may have sub-titles and lack stars but in every other way it's a Hollywood action movie, not so much written as constructed around the hallowed rules of the cliffhanger. For a raiding party is already on its way with plans to kidnap and enslave them.
Now they're trying to placate the gods with human sacrifices - as Jaguar Paw and friends are soon to discover. The troublemakers are the Mayan city dwellers whose profligate ways have brought famine on the land. But family ties are strong and the forest still sustains them. Mayan humour centres on blokey badinage about ball-breaking mothers-in-law. You couldn't call it an intellectual community. The proof is in their reward - an existence spent in bucolic bliss. Everybody but the tapir agrees that they've made nature their friend. This, I might add, does not apply to the tapir-hunting forest dwellers. The Mayans have plundered their natural surroundings without thought for the future. The Aztecs were into the mass sacrifice thing. As a result, the film's few moments of reflection centre on the ecological. The consensus is that the Mayan sacrifices portrayed in the film are much closer to Aztec ritual practices.
He also professes to see parallels between the decline of Mayan culture and our own. Presumably, he also felt that if he could make the box-office warm to a film made in Aramaic, getting it to swallow the Mayan language Yucatec would be a breeze. He just says that the more he read about the Mayans the more interested he became. As far as I know Gibson hasn't commented on this Machiavellian interpretation of his motives.