Among all the stars in the moviedom, Mel Gibson is a special one. I can hardly do a summary for his cinematic career 'cause his works are really hard to categorize and may I say --- "in a mess". However, he always managed to surprise me. However controversial his films may be, they have reasons which I'm willing to accept.<br /><br />This film is a milestone to be recorded in cinematic history for its ancient theme, unprecedented language, insufferable contents and all other pleasant enough aspects of film-making.<br /><br />Living in this modern world, we hardly bother to ask what we are and where we're from. We know Darwin's theory. We know life changes and is not easy. But we never know in detail what happened to our ancestors as individuals. We just sum them up into a few paragraphs on some history book.<br /><br />This film is about Maya, yet it also applies to every other ancient civilization. It threw me into the ancient jungle and carried me on this incredible journey of knives and arrows, ignorance and intelligence, death and birth, love and hatred...<br /><br />Despite all the blood and tension, I have to admit the primitive did a good job to carry on the human evolution --- at least, we are here with flesh and blood.<br /><br />I had this imagery that if the whole evolution thing is a huge army and all humans are just allocated at random by God into some squads categorized by eras, and I ask myself, "If my soul happened to be allocated into the Mayan 'Squad', would I survive and had a life in peace and love?"It's a rather frustrating question since I'll never know the answer. Well, most possibly the answer is negative...<br /><br />Anyway, we don't necessarily need the answer, but we do need the consciousness and introspection because when we project ourselves against the primitive background, we can always discover new things in our body and soul.<br /><br />In that case, this film itself is an apocalypto lest we forget how different yet common we are compared to our ancestors.