Apocalypto

Corrected entry: Even though the entire tribe was taken captive at the beginning of the film, when Jaguar Paw returns home he is able to kill the bad guy using the trap that killed the wild boar in the beginning. In the interest of safely, it is unlikely that such a dangerous trap would be left set all the time, and the men of the tribe were not out hunting at the time of their capture. Further, it is doubtful that one man would be able to set such a trap by himself, especially in the amount of time shown, so it is unlikely that Jaguar Paw found the trap sprung and set it up all by himself.

Correction: Since OSHA didn't exist at this time, I don't think they were too worried about "safety on the job." They were probably more concerned with catching enough food to survive. They'd leave the traps set to increase their chances of catching more tapir. The hunters knew where the traps were and what the catches looked like; their chances of getting hurt were pretty low.

Phixius

Corrected entry: When the baby is being born in the water it doesn't cough or choke afterwards.

Correction: The baby has been breathing fluid for 9 months in the womb. It's used to it. Only when the baby begins respiration for a length of time does it begin to choke on water.

Corrected entry: The sick girl predicts a man will run with a Jaguar. Twice following the actual run, the hunters refer to the animal as a Jaguar. In fact, it was a Black Panther which is related to, but is not, a Jaguar.

Correction: Black panthers are actually melanistic jaguars. Melanistic leopards are also sometimes called black panthers but of course they wouldn't have been known to the South American peoples since leopards live in Africa.

Corrected entry: The Mayan empire and civilization was abandoned by 900 AD, 600 years before the Spanish ships would have been seen.

Correction: There have been several different periods in Mayan civilization, but they were still around when the Spanish arrived. The collapse of the Classic Period did happen around 900-910 AD, but was followed by the Postclassic Period and the Mayans were still around at the time of Spanish contact with the last independent Mayan city falling around 1697.

Bishop73

Corrected entry: When prisoners are taken to the sacrifice temple, Jaguar Paw's friend says something about getting revenge in Hell. Hell is a Christian concept, thus there is no way Indians could have used it at that time, before the Spanish Conquest.

Correction: It says Hell in the ENGLISH subtitles because the subtitles are supposed to help ENGLISH speakers to understand the movie. If the subtitles had said the Mayan equivalent of Hell, ENGLISH speakers would not have known what it meant.

Blibbetyblip

Corrected entry: Given they seem to be so close (it takes him less than two days to get home) and so aggressive, it seems unlikely that Jaguar Paw's people have no knowledge of the existence of the Mayan city. Maya settlements at that time were widespread, with communities scattered widely around a political center.

Correction: Who says they had no idea of the existence of the Mayan City?

Correction: His people knew of the city, but had never seen many of the things there. It would be comparable to someone born and raised in the country suddenly finding themselves in the middle of New York City.

Corrected entry: When the men are being killed and asked to run out into an open piece of land, the son of the leader has his leg pulled by a surviving victim and says in English "get off me".

Alicia Reynoso Curiel

Correction: He doesn't speak English at all.

That's my point, he says it.

Correction: When Jaguar Paw jumps off the waterfall and yells back to the warriors he appears as to not have the arrow wound from the front, but in fact there was still a small amount of blood and a small hole.

Corrected entry: In various close-ups of the male Indians' faces, you will see tiny but thick hairs "growing back again" in the mustache-part of the face like after-some-time shaved. In real life, American Indians couldn't grow beards or mustaches; it was a genetical condition of their race.

Correction: Several of my friends are aboriginal to the Americas, and while they, for the most part, don't have thick facial hair, most do have hairs in the places many other races have mustaches and beards. In fact, a few of them have mustaches, even if they look like an average Caucasian 16 year old's.

rswarrior

Corrected entry: When the woman gives birth in the watery pit, the baby is quite big compared to how small the woman's belly was before the birth.

Correction: At term, there is very little correlation between the size of a pregnant woman's abdomen and the size of the baby. A large portion of the baby's body has moved into the mother's pelvis 2-3 weeks prior to delivery (the "drop" into position for delivery). The newborn seen in the movie is certainly consistent with the size of the near-term abdomen.

Corrected entry: The journey of captured people and the war party, brings them on the right side of a river (looking downstream), and they proceed crossing it from right to left. Later, on his journey back home, Jaguar Paw jumps into a waterfall and swims out on the opposite bank again crossing this river from right to left, and yet soon we learn that he is back in his neck of the woods, despite the fact that he crossed two rivers.

Correction: Rivers can divide up and rejoin themselves. Jaguar Paw took a much different route home than the one he left by. It's a big jungle.

Phixius

Corrected entry: Jaguar Paw, apparently severely wounded by an arrow wound to the abdomen, manages to run all night without tiring and to keep ahead of a group of uninjured professional warriors. This seems highly unlikely.

Correction: Unlikely, but not impossible. Adrenalin can do amazing things to people. Besides, pretty much any movie in existence requires some suspension of disbelief in order for it to be an interesting movie. I have never yet seen people burst out into song, and a choreographed dance number spontaneously, like in all the musicals ever made.

Correction: I was born crying. Not a mistake.

Corrected entry: When they are sacrificing the captives, they tear out the beating heart of the person. They then hold it up, and the person watches in horror as his own heart is beating. If you ripped out a beating heart, the person's blood pressure would drop to zero right away, and they would black out.

Correction: Absolutely wrong. A person who loses all cardiac function instantaneously (say, by having their heart removed, which will do it, every time) will die of cerebral anoxia as the blood circulation and therefore the oxygen supply to the brain fails. Between the removal of the heart and total loss of consciousness the brain will operate on its own stored oxygen reserves, typically allowing fifty to sixty seconds of activity in a resting adult - or in this case, one tied to a sacrificial altar.

Corrected entry: Heads and bodies rolling down a flight of stairs would disperse, causing a triangular stain on the steps. The film has an inverted triangle. I assume the flight of steps is level.

Correction: The triangle is painted on, just like the lines running up the stairs on the edge are painted blue.

Bishop73

Corrected entry: Before jumping down the waterfall, Jaguar Paw as well as his pursuers are standing only ankle-deep in water right before the abyss. Considering how much water is coming down, it's unthinkable that you'd only get your feet wet.

Correction: But it is not impossible, the water if you look is running very fast behind Jaguar Paw. The water would not pool up before the waterfall unless it was being blocked so the water remains at a certain level before it goes over the falls. It is a river, hence nothing to contain the water.

Corrected entry: When Jaguar Paw is escaping and is at the top of the waterfall about to jump, several shots show a very modern white cruise ship in the background.

Correction: The thing you see isn't a cruise ship, it is part of the river where there are some rapids. The shape of that part of the river does resemble the shape of a ship, but if you zoom in you will see that it is only part of the rapids and not a cruise ship.

Corrected entry: When the jaguar is killed, the head of the dead animal is on top of the body of the Mayan warrior it had previously mangled. In the following wide shot the animal is several meters away from its prey.

Correction: Between seeing the jaguar's head on the warrior and the overhead shot, there is a shot of the other warriors dragging something - dragging the jaguar off the dead guy.

Correction: The dead guy was taken by the monkeys seen earlier fighting for the corpse.

Corrected entry: After Jaguar Paw is captured and tied up by the raiders, he looks over towards the hole and the man he killed. When a guard goes over to check the man, you can see that the "dead" man is very obviously breathing.

Correction: So Jaguar Paw didn't kill him outright, he just knocked him unconscious. If the man isn't dead yet, he is certainly in the process of dying.

Phixius

Factual error: During the big sacrifice scene an eclipse happens. An eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the earth and the sun. Later, apparently that night, the night mood is set by a shot of a full moon. The moon cannot be full until fourteen days after an eclipse, when it is directly opposite the sun.

5thgroup

More mistakes in Apocalypto

Jaguar Paw: Resting fathers, fly me your strength.

More quotes from Apocalypto

Trivia: As a bit of an easter-egg, Mel Gibson included a single-frame of an actor dressed as Wally/Waldo from the "Where's Wally/Waldo?" book series in the theatrical version of the film. It was reportedly seen as being in poor taste, so it was removed from the initial DVD release. However, he was allegedly added back into the film for the Blu-Ray release.

TedStixon

More trivia for Apocalypto

Question: When they come across the girl crying over her mother's body, one of the guards says she has the sickness, and when they arrive in the city, they come across an old man who has the laughing sickness - what sicknesses are they referring to?

Answer: It is not specifically identified, but it appears to be the degenerative neurological disease called kuru. It is fatal and believed to have been spread in ancient sub-tropical cultures by cannibalism. Its symptoms resembles the encephalopathy disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob (Mad Cow), which is also called the laughing sickness, and is contracted by eating contaminated flesh.

raywest

Answer: Kuru only happens when you eat your relatives and the disease was discovered and studied in Papua New Guinea where eating your dead relatives was a way to carry them with you. There are books about it, fascinating stuff. Eating strangers is safe, not that I recommend eating anyone. The disease the girl has is smallpox brought by the Spanish, thus the ships at the end of the movie are not the first Spanish to visit the area. The laughing sickness could be straight up madness considering the horrible times everyone is living through, or a side effect of the limestone quarrying.

More questions & answers from Apocalypto

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