without wiki or imdb name three characters or two of the tribes that were depicted? you can't because they were basically nameless and grouped together like that wasn't a major factor. Any other film, and this small (but big detail) is immediately a strike for lack of focus or central storyline. Add that on top of all the famished looking, fucked teeth smiling, overly violent powers that be, and their is a lot of e-racing and stereotyping going on. If Mel had made a movie about the Aztecs, the brutal inter-tribe waring would've made much more sense, being that they tended to fight more than other indigenous civilizations, but Mel made a movie about the Maya.

As scholars like Acuna and Murguia have pointed out (about history and Apocolypto) the very idea of human sacrifice is so misrepresented and over-blown that it denies the fact that the Maya's historical record was looted, destroyed and misinterpreted by the very colonizers who try to frame the Maya (and other indigenous groups) as savages. So for Mel to base a whole movie on the supposed violence for sport / human sacrifice bullshit is to continue that very problematic narrative.

Than their is Mel's "commentary" on the film were he says he left the real "gnarly stuff" out. LOL, what a fucn clown. If he knew shit about anything he'd know that one of the main reasons Europeans were able to colonize the Maya civilization is because, they were in a state of stasis. Their leaders had grown lazy and un-alert of possible foreign invaders. their last real war was with Vikings nearly 400 years prior. Maya had an abundance of food, land and what the European thought of as material wealth. Their was no famine, drought and in-fighting, that came after the white-man polluted the civilization with his flu, guns, ideas on ownership and Christianity.

it's the same shit that makes me roll my eyes when a shitty movie about the slave trade, reconstruction, or jim crow America is made (ehhem... The Help). Did Apocalypto look good yes, was some of the violence intense/enjoyable yes, could i sit through it a 3rd time, fuck no. I find the movie, in particular it's story, ridiculous