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“Didn’t Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” deal with some of this on film?”

Wasn’t that the movie that had subtitles in English? I didn’t see it, but I don’t do subtitles. If I have to read, I’ll read a book! A movie is a visual experience, and subtitles distract completely from the cinematography. I much prefer dubbing, even poor dubbing, then being forced to take my eyes from the film to read subtitles! I watched “Das Boot” in both versions, and vastly preferred the dubbed version.

To a small degree, but not much really. The conquistadors were arriving and the natives how were free ran from the ships also, which was sort of casting the typical...Spaniards were the slaughters view. Far from reality. Seemed that way to me, although I saw the movie quite some time ago. If a real authentic movie was made about Cortex and his 900 men who took on millions of crazed Aztec warriors, it would surpass anything ever made. The odds were huge against them, but he and his men had a real moral fight and outrage and that drove them. They got some spoils of gold and such also, but the battles and trials were far far more testing and hard than any amount of gold that made that the main motivation. But yes, the actual savage murders of the Indians was portrayed pretty good by Gibson.

Yes, Mel Gibson dealt brilliantly with the subject of the Aztecs and their subhuman brutality in Apocalypto. What's funny is he sold it to the liberal movie critics as a critique of American imperialism. It was released during the Iraq war and could be interpreted as an allegory with the Aztecs playing the role of American bully boy the weaker local tribes -- i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan. But that wasn't the movie's real message. It was really about how the coming of Western civilization, of Christendom, which the Conquistadors brought with them, put an end to the Aztec bloodlust and was in fact a good thing, contrary to prevailing PC opinion.

This is made almost explicit in the last scene where you see the Spanish galleons floating in the bay with their masts shaped like crosses. At that moment you realize that the movie's protagonist, the tribesman slave who slips free of the Aztecs' sacrificial system and spends the last third of the movie trying to get away, is going to be okay. That's when you know that Western civilization, with its regard for human life and safety and justice, has arrived, just in the nick of time. You know they're not going to let the Aztecs kill him. The movie is pretty close to a stroke of genius in my opinion.