Dear CMFH,
Having a wee one, I probably won’t get to see sacrificial hearts flung across the big screen in Apocalypto. Sure there are big issues of historical accuracy according to National Geographic, but I would be watching it as eye candy anyway, ala Dances with Wolves
First nugget, Yul Brenner stars in a Dances with Wolves vs. Apocalypto pre-Conquest cage match! Yul is Chief Black Eagle, who one day stumbles onto a big Mayan pyramid that is being built in North America in the 1963 classic Kings of the Sun. A Mayan prince in exile, who like all princes looks like Frankie Avalon, is building a new home. Its not the prince that grabs Yul’s attention, but a certain princess… Aside from the love triangle, this is based on theories that were prevalent in the U.S. to explain archaeological sites like Cahokia. Surely those savages that we are evicting from the fertile lands around the Mississippi did not build such wonders, thought the scientists of the day. The fact that they inhabit these big pyramidal earthworks proves that the brutes killed the earlier, more civilized, possibly Mesoamerican peoples that built them. Exterminating people who, hypothetically, exterminated other people is OK, right?
Second suggestion for an Apocalypto prequel is one that I highly recommend, even though I have not seen it. My neighbor rented it from this really cool video store in Madison, and even though he offered to let me watch it before he returned it I said, nah, I’m kinda busy, I’ll rent it later. The title is Chac, The Rain God, and it looks beautiful. Sumptuous footage shot in Chiapas, spoken in a Mayan dialect with subtitles. I can’t say much beyond that.
--Mayan Mythbuster