Multicultural Mel

If you're looking for other perspectives on Apocalypto, I'd recommend Britt Peterson's TNR piece, Mel Gibson, Multiculturalist, which makes a case I briefly considered including in my review. Petersen admits that the film isn't exactly an academic cultural-historical study, and it has its factual waffles, but, on the whole, she thinks it's worth praising Gibson's effort to recreate and expose foreign civilizations to the American masses.

I'd probably agree, and I'd add that, when I was taking a Medieval Film & History course (no, they did not have films in the middle ages, silly) in college, one of the points my professor harped on was that a lot of the primary sources historians rely on were really more like present day films than scholarly research. Their emphasis wasn't so much on getting the minute details and timelines precisely correct, but instead was on crafting narratives and perspectives that served the historian's--or his patron's--purpose. In other words, maybe filmmakers like Mel Gibson, or even Ridley Scott, are truer historians than we might like to admit.