7) Apocalypto
Mel Gibson’s directing career has followed a pretty strange trajectory, from the low-key The Man Without a Face to Braveheart (elsewhere on this list) to the super-controversial The Passion of the Christ to, finally, the enjoyably ridiculous Apocalypto. I say ridiculous because it must have been tricky for Gibson to get as much wrong about his central subject, the Maya empire, as he did.
The film’s hero, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), lives in a hunting village at an undetermined time towards the decline of the Maya civilization. That set-up alone was enough to irk a few historians, who impress the fact that the Mayan people were big into agriculture, not hunting. However, Gibson’s film took much larger leaps than just that.
Apocalypto painted the Mayas as savages, who brutally tortured captives and made huge human sacrifices. No evidence exists to support the idea that Maya warriors captured people from uncharted territory and sacrificed them. Plus, there’s little evidence to support the idea that the Mayas made sacrifices on the huge scale that Apocalypto suggests, or on ceremonial stones. Such serious bloodletting is much more frequently paired with the Aztecs than the Mayas. The same goes for the massive amount of slaves Apocalypto claims that the savage Mayas maintained. And actually, the Mayas had a highly sophisticated society and made many hugely important contributions to science and the arts. Just not on Gibson’s watch.
However, nothing compares to the film’s ending, which totally wrecks all pretense of historical accuracy by introducing conquistador ships that simply have no business existing during the time of the Maya empire. The Spaniards arrived in Guatemala almost 400 years after the collapse of the Maya empire, historians agree. Apocalypto is far from a terrible movie, but its historical inaccuracy is off the charts.