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Warning: spoilers below.

Apocalypto is the touching tale of an Indian a Mexican a Native American who changes colour. He comes from a small village that calls pigs “tapirs”, and hunts them with intricate booby traps that would make Indiana Jones jealous. The chameleone-sque Native American, named Jaguar Paw, is a practical joker, much like all the men in his village except for his exceptionally big neighbor, who we will call Little John.

The villain in the movie is the evil Mayan Empire, who sends an Einsatzgruppe to Jaguar Paw’s village to kidnap pretty much everyone but the children. The Mayans are masters-of-arms, and Jaguar Paw and his neighbors (hereafter “Jungle Dwellers”) are no match for them, despite the hulking mass of Little John. These children are later forced to fend for themselves in the jungle, and ultimately inspire the writing of Lord of the Flies, then presumably die, as we never see them again. Before the main battle sequence between the Mayans and Jungle Dwellers, Jaguar Paw stashes his wife and son away in a long-abandoned sarlacc pit, right before Jaguar Paw gets his ass-kicked. He is then force-marched, along with the rest of the Jungle Dwellers, to the dying lands of the evil Mayans. On the way, the war-band, with captured Jungle Dwellers, comes across a lone child with boils, who starts talking nonsense and then makes Nostradamus-like predictions. Only, the predictions aren’t neat little poems, nor in French, and are much creepier because they come from a diseased child.

In Maya-land, rich people wear green ink. They also have funky hairstyles and some, like the Emperor, have pieces of jade magically stuck to their faces. This is due to Mayan magic, which was once very potent, until the gods decided to punish the Mayans by killing their crops and spreading disease among the people. Making jade sticky enough not to fall off one’s nose, however, is still magically possible.

Jungle Dweller women are auctioned off to the green-skinned Mayans, while the men climb a Mayan temple to be sacrificed to the Mayan sun-god. This is the part where Jaguar Paw changes colour for the first time. He is painted blue to show that he is sad and hopeless. A fat kid laughs at him, and Jaguar Paw ponders how he can not die, and then he is miraculously saved by a freak solar eclipse. He and the Jungle Dwellers who haven’t been sacrificed are then forced to play a game of run-away-from-the-flying-objects-and-dodge-a-melee-weapon-at-the-end-of-the-field. Jaguar Paw beats this game using Indian Mexican Native American Jungle Dweller sneakery, along with the help of Little John (who never got to showcase his strength in the way we hoped before he was killed). This is when Jaguar Paw kills the son of the Einsatzgruppe leader with an arrowhead, then makes off across a mass grave and back to the jungle. (See what Mel Gibson did here? The Jungle Dweller returning to the jungle?) It should be pretty clear how the rest of this goes.

The ensuing chase scene lasts days, like some sort of freak Elvish/Dwarfish pursuit across Middle Earth where conveniently, everyone’s stamina is maxed out during an important plot element. After tricking a Jaguar into killing his pursuers, Jaguar Paw orphans a poor jaguar cub when the Einsatzgruppe kill the jaguar in revenge. One dude points out how the combination of a diseased, prediction-telling child, a freak solar eclipse, and the convenient jaguar-killing-a-man incident is a bad omen, but he is silenced not long thereafter by a snake-bite to the jugular, thus validating his concerns. The rest of his troupe press on nonetheless, whereupon they follow Jaguar Paw over the side of a waterfall, where one of the troupe members inconveniently bashes his head on a rock. This is where Jaguar Paw changes colour back to red brown Native American.

While Jaguar Paw has, at this time, shown an exceptional ability to dodge flying objects (despite being hit with a non-fatal arrow), he is not bright enough to not fall into a pool of quicksand. Nonetheless, he somehow manages to swim through it and climb out, whereupon he gains immense luck and shortly thereafter finds a poisonous toad. Now grey (see: Gandalf the Grey), Jaguar Paw pulls a MacGuyver and fashions poisonous blow-darts, which he uses to dispose of another pursuer. Having mastered the art of stealing bases in baseball during his tribe’s league games, he also manages to run at an attacker, slide beneath the attacker’s swinging weapon, and gracefully pick up a bludgeon which he uses to dispatch another enemy. There is glorious blood-mist in this scene.

Back at his old village, Jaguar Paw stumbles upon his wife in her watery hole (it’s raining at this point, and the sarlacc pit is steadily filling up with water). Oh, and Jaguar Paw is no longer grey now, but back to his original colour, just like he’s back at his village. (Gibson, you genius!) Here, Jaguar Paw uses boob-trappery to take out the Einsatzgruppe leader, just before stumbling upon Christopher Columbus and what we assume are boatloads of diseased blankets.

In the end, Jaguar Paw manages to pull his wife and now two kids (yeah, she had a baby while in the pit) out of the hole, whereupon they live happily ever after roaming through the jungle. With no shoes.

This BuzzCap brought to you by Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute IPA and Palo Santo Marron.

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