One fine day, the bewildered remnants of a neighboring tribe straggle in, warning that the village's bucolic way of life is in danger. Here's the story: Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is a handsome young hunter who lives in a remote jungle village with his young son and pregnant wife (Dalia Hernandez).
The above catalog of harm only begins to hint at the dulling and eventually comic frequency of physical violence in Apocalypto, which progresses as a series of static set pieces that are little more than narrative pretexts for graphically imagined anguish. Having one's face chewed off by a panther. Having one's head subsequently chopped off and thrown down the stairs of a pyramid. Getting one's heart cut out in a sacrificial ritual.
Seeing one's father have his throat slit. Being tricked into rubbing a caustic agent on one's own genitals while the whole village watches and laughs. Rudy Youngblood in Apocalypto Here is a partial list of the indignities to which the human body is subjected in Mel Gibson's Mayan epic Apocalypto ( Buena Vista): being impaled on a trap made of animal bones. A Pre-History of Violence Mel Gibson's bloody, bewildering Apocalypto.