There's more controversy around Apocalypto, this time it's from the Mayan activists who believe that they are misrepresented in the film and that it promotes stereotypes.

Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation that promotes Mayan culture, said:

"Gibson replays, in glorious big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact, needed, rescue"

Lucio Yaxon, a Mayan human rights activist, said:

"Basically the director is saying the Mayans are savages"

The story on Reuters has some comeback though, and I have to side with this:

Richard Hansen, an archaeologist who Gibson consulted on the making of the film, says the director took pains to ensure authenticity and historical accuracy.

Perhaps this is a painful past for Mayan's to look at, but if it's the best, most historical look at the past on film, then perhaps we should see it. Would we rather forget everyone's past, because we all have dark times in our histories, we have dark times in our present too. Stories should be told not forgotten, and people educated to realise that this is the past and people have changed, frankly if they can't grasp that then they're a bit thick.

The other point, and this is perhaps the biggest killer of this whole story, is that none of these people have seen the film - well perhaps Hansen has - because only the trailer has been shown in Maya. Yes they're all complaining about the trailer, they haven't even seen the whole film.