As the Mayan kingdom faces its decline, the rulers insist the key to
prosperity is to build more temples and offer human sacrifices. Jaguar
Paw, a young man captured for sacrifice, flees to avoid his fate.
Director: Mel Gibson
Writers: Mel Gibson,
Farhad Safinia
Stars: Gerardo Taracena,
Raoul Trujillo,
Dalia Hernández
Storyline
In the Maya civilization, a peaceful tribe is brutally attacked by
warriors seeking slaves and human beings for sacrifice for their gods.
Jaguar Paw hides his pregnant wife and his son in a deep hole nearby
their tribe and is captured while fighting with his people. An eclipse
spares his life from the sacrifice and later he has to fight to survive
and save his beloved family.
User Reviews
Say
what you want about Mel Gibson, but he knows how to make an
authentically real statement about the human condition. The movie is
about civilization and how smaller is better. There are some rain-forest
dwelling American natives, somewhere in America where there are jaguars
and monkeys. Then there are some "civilized" natives, with a huge
society of nobles, serfs, slaves and sacrificial victims who get their
hearts torn out and heads chopped off on top of a pyramid, for the
appeasement of their gods and for the sake of controlling and
entertaining the "citizens." Our noble small villagers of the forest are
ultimately hunted down and enslaved by the more organized, and totally
vicious, pyramid builders. This is a story of how one of these villagers
deals with the horrific trials that his captors heap upon him. The
whole movie is in an ancient native language, subtitled in English, and
it lends an air of excruciating authenticity to the happenings. One gets
the feeling of being a time traveler, as this 500-year-old world seems
so real, with every detail of weaponry, cookware, clothing, jewelry,
labor practices, buildings, village characters, and sacrificial
ceremonies so obviously researched that it made me feel uncomfortably
like I was involved in it all. We are constantly getting the crowd's
point of view of all the empire's activities and abuse of its captives
and underlings. There is a lot to look at here, from God's beautiful
nature to man's nightmarish creations, so it deserves to be seen on a
big screen.
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