The reviewers are trying to damn this movie with an untruthful and insincere mantra about its alleged excess of violence: "brutally violent," "over-the-top violence," "unrelenting violence," "ultraviolent," "The Hills Have Eyes in the jungle," "unpleasant, pointless, gruesome, and exploitative," "pure, amoral sensationalism," "blood and gore  so extreme that they provoke titters of ridicule," "savage cruelty and sadistic barbarity," "lunatic violence," "feverish, mad violence." You'd think from the reviews that you were going to see two hours of babies being fed through a wood chipper. One went as far as to claim that it made the Saw movies seem like Little Women or some such nonsense.<br /><br />It does no such thing. The Saw films were gratuitously and sadisticly violent; they set out to make audiences squirm and blanch at their sick, nihilistic machinations.<br /><br />Apocalypto, on the other hand, is the typical, essentially optimistic Disney story of a happy Indian youth ripped savagely from his rainforest life by ruthless marauders, after which he has to escape and fight his way back to his land and people. That's it.<br /><br />The violence arises from the fact that these particular marauders are bloodthirsty Mayan warriors harvesting neighboring tribes for their human sacrifices. Even then, much of the violence is Shakespearean and takes place just off-camera. For instance, you see women being carried off in the rape-and-pillage scene and you hear their cries but you don't see them being raped and murdered. Battles are staged much as they were in Braveheart. And yes, there's a beating heart lifted from a sacrificed man's chest by a blood-streaked Mayan shaman, but moviegoers saw the same thing in Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; it got a PG rating and we read no critical hysterics about "lunatic violence." On the whole, you'll see as much blood and gore on the average CSI episode.<br /><br />It probably should have been titled Jaguar Paw's Great Adventure. The glimpses Gibson provides of Mayan civilization are jaw-dropping. You won't ever see a more convincing cinematic evocation of another time and place in such scope and meticulous detail. Every face seems to have a complete history as Jaguar Paw is marched through the Mayan city. A well-to-do Mayan woman does nothing more than look at the prisoners from her doorway but the story her face tells is voluminous.<br /><br />The last part of the movie is a rousing chase akin to The Naked Prey, and again, no more bloody and violent then the film it resembles. <br /><br />Let's be plain here. What really has the critics'--especially those of the Eastern Elite variety--panties in a twist is the director, Mel Gibson. He said some things that upset them, plus (and most unforgivably) he's an outspoken and conservative Christian, so they're going to practice any sort of mendacity that will keep people from buying tickets to his film. <br /><br />Don't buy the lies or you'll miss an amazing movie.