WARNING: review contains plot spoilers!

Mel Gibson sucks….

And why? Well, of course because he holds questionable ideas (and certainly his father does), and because his newest movie sucks too.

I went to Mel Gibson’s new movie Apocalypto last Saturday, with my Friday-evening-friends. And was not impressed. The only thing remarkable about the movie is that it is completely spoken in Maya, not a word of English. For the rest, it is one long chain of perversive cruelty and clich

In reality, the large majority of people wouldn’t pick up on even one of the ‘blunders’ in the film.  Few people have a comprehensive knowledge of mayan culture.

That’s true of course.

That is why movie makers can get away with revising history and then over time their depicted version of history becomes the popular belief of the way things actually happened, when it is really anything but true.

Remember how movies twist history.  One of my son’s favorite movies is
The Mummy which has everyone speaking ancient Egyptian including the modern characters.  Since Egyptian is a centuries dead language that we only know how to translate b/c of the Rosetta stone, we don’t know how it was spoken.  Since Maya culture is probably more popular culture obscure than Egyptian, of course we don’t know as much.  This is such an important part of the culture of the Americas, it is a shame that it is not more learned about

I am an ex associate - 18 January 2007 01:03 AM

Remember how movies twist history.  One of my son’s favorite movies is
The Mummy which has everyone speaking ancient Egyptian including the modern characters.  Since Egyptian is a centuries dead language that we only know how to translate b/c of the Rosetta stone, we don’t know how it was spoken.  Since Maya culture is probably more popular culture obscure than Egyptian, of course we don’t know as much.  This is such an important part of the culture of the Americas, it is a shame that it is not more learned about

Hmmm, I think we may actually have some idea of how ancient Egyptian (which of course begs the question of which type of ancient Egyptian, but we’ll ignore that for now) might have been pronounced due to transliterations into other languages that we do know of.  I’m not sure of this, though; I’ll have to check around and see.

One of my favourite bits in Stargate (the movie), was that Dr. Jackson couldn’t make himself understood because his Egyptian ‘accent’ was so bad.

Both Stargate and The Mummy used Stuart Tyson Smith (a real Egyptologist from UCSB) to write the Egyptian dialogue.

—

If anyone’s really interested (and no-one ever is), I recommend “How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs” by Mark Collier (University of Liverpool) and Bill Manley (British Museum). [Amazon Link]

Ugh!  I absolutely refuse to see that movie.  The only thing that surprises me is how many people did.

Razela - 18 January 2007 04:53 PM

Ugh!  I absolutely refuse to see that movie.  The only thing that surprises me is how many people did.

Well it’s not one of Kurt Russel’s best, I’ll admit.

Now you are making me want to see it just to know for myself.

It may be remembered as the “truth” but the movie had several errors I think.

The Spanish conquerers in Mexico defeated the Aztecs not Mayans.

There were no total solar eclipses of the sun in Mexico in the 20 years before and during the Spanish invasion.

Poisonous frogs are in South America not Mexico

Nice research Hoxam.  oh, and welcome to the forum.