Set in Yucatán around the year 1502, Apocalypto portrays the hero's journey of a young man named Jaguar Paw, a late Mesoamerican hunter and his fellow tribesmen who are captured by an invading force.

While hunting in the Mesoamerican rainforest, Jaguar Paw, his father Flint Sky, and their fellow tribesmen encounter a group of refugees fleeing from war and devastation.

Along the way, the raiders and their captives encounter razed forests and vast fields of failed maize crops, alongside villages decimated by an unknown disease.

[5] Arriving in the city, the captives are divided; the women are sold into slavery while the men are escorted to the top of a pyramid where they are brutally sacrificed to appease the gods.

As Jaguar Paw is laid out on the altar, a solar eclipse occurs and the Maya take the event as an omen that the gods are satisfied, thereby sparing the remaining captives.

The Holcane Warriors The City Screenwriter and co-producer Farhad Safinia first met Mel Gibson while working as an assistant during the post-production of The Passion of the Christ.

We wanted to update the chase genre by, in fact, not updating it with technology or machinery but stripping it down to its most intense form, which is a man running for his life, and at the same time getting back to something that matters to him.—Farhad Safinia[6]Gibson said they wanted to "shake up the stale action-adventure genre", which he felt was dominated by CGI, stock stories and shallow characters and to create a footchase that would "feel like a car chase that just keeps turning the screws.

It was a far more interesting world to explore why and what happened to them.—Farhad Safinia[6]The two researched ancient Maya history, reading both creation and destruction myths, including sacred texts such as the Popul Vuh.

As they researched the script, Safinia and Gibson traveled to Guatemala, Costa Rica and the Yucatán Peninsula to scout filming locations and visit Maya ruins.

Striving for a degree of historical accuracy, the filmmakers employed a consultant, Richard D. Hansen, a specialist in the Maya and assistant professor of archaeology at Idaho State University.

[14] An example of attention to detail is the left arm tattoo of Seven, Jaguar Paw's wife, which is a horizontal band with two dots above – the Maya glyph for the number seven.

Simon Atherton, an English armorer and weapon-maker who worked with Gibson on Braveheart, was hired to research and provide reconstructions of Maya weapons.

[15]However, while many of the architectural details of the Mayan cities are correct,[11] they are blended from different locations and eras,[11] a decision Farhad Safinia said was made for aesthetic reasons.

[16] It is a later Mayan city built around a pyramid that had been erected centuries before, examples of which are found in places such as the Postclassic sites of Muyil, Coba, and others in Quintana Roo, Mexico.

[citation needed] Gibson filmed Apocalypto mainly in Catemaco, San Andrés Tuxtla and Paso de Ovejas in the Mexican state of Veracruz.

As a joke, Gibson inserted a subliminal cameo of the bearded director in a plaid shirt with a cigarette hanging from his mouth posing next to a group of dust-covered Maya.

On September 23, 2006, Gibson pre-screened the unfinished film to two predominantly Native American audiences in the US state of Oklahoma, at the Riverwind Casino in Goldsby, owned by the Chickasaw Nation, and at Cameron University in Lawton.

[8] The film serves as a cultural critique – in Hansen's words, a "social statement" – sending the message that it is never a mistake to question our own assumptions about morality.

In a negative review, Salon noted: People are curious about this movie because of what might be called extra-textual reasons, because its director is an erratic and charismatic Hollywood figure who would have totally marginalized himself by now if he didn't possess a crude gift for crafting violent pop entertainment.

"[39] Martin Scorsese, writing about the film, called it "a vision," adding, Many pictures today don't go into troubling areas like this, the importance of violence in the perpetuation of what's known as civilization.

[45] In contrast, Mayanist David Stuart stated that human sacrifice was not rare and based on carvings and mural paintings, there are "more and greater similarities between the Aztecs and Mayas.

"[46] Aside from the controversy surrounding the alleged historical inaccuracies, scholars and indigenous activists were concerned over the film's highlighting the human sacrifices that occurred during the later years before the Spanish conquest.

[47] Anthropologist Traci Ardren felt that Apocalypto was biased because "no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities".

[48] The film has also been criticized by Guatemalan activist Ignacio Ochoa as "an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue.

[45] Archaeological sites indicate that the Mayas used several methods for sacrifice such as "decapitation, heart excision, dismemberment, hanging, disembowelment, skin flaying, skull splitting and burning.

[16] Another disputed scene, when Jaguar Paw and the rest of the captives are used as target practice, was acknowledged by the filmmakers to be invented as a plot device for igniting the chase sequence.

[16] According to the DVD commentary track by Mel Gibson and Farhad Safinia, the ending of the film was meant to depict the first contact between the Spaniards and Mayas that took place in 1511 when Pedro de Alvarado arrived on the coast of the Yucatán and Guatemala, and also during the fourth voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1502.

Traci Ardren, anthropologist, wrote that the arrival of the Spanish as Christian missionaries had a "blatantly colonial message that the Mayas needed saving because they were 'rotten at the core.

'"[48] According to Ardren, Apocalypto "replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, they needed, rescue.

"[48] David van Biema, in an article written for Time, questions whether the Spaniards are portrayed as saviors of the Mayas, since they are depicted ominously with Jaguar Paw acknowledging their arrival as a threat and deciding to return to the woods.