Directed by Mel Gibson. Starring Rudy Youngblood and Dalia Hernandez. In Maya with English subtitles. Rated 18A.

Among myriad other marvels, it now looks as if the Mayans might have invented the shopping mall (a prototype for which seems to have recently popped up in the jungles of Guatemala). In other words, the creators of Mesoamerica’s first great urban civilization weren’t just about cutting hearts out of painted chests, although human sacrifice was unquestionably part of their religious beliefs.

Mel Gibson, however, is primarily preoccupied with this sanguinary custom. The maker of The Passion of the Christ and Braveheart couldn’t care less about their progressive social legislation, mathematical genius, or calendars, which were centuries ahead of their time.

Nevertheless, even if he does treat the masters of the Yucatán like 15th-century Nazis, Apocalypto isn’t racist in the usual sense of the word. Instead, it follows the baby-boomer prejudice pioneered by Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves, wherein good Native people are presented as “hippies”, while their evil counterparts are depicted as “punks”. Gibson has substituted forest people for Sioux and Mayans for Pawnee, but the Aquarian Age game remains the same.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Apocalypto is how much it resembles a 1966 Cornel Wilde movie called The Naked Prey. In that Tarzan-ish adventure, the sole white survivor of an ambushed safari must try to outrun a group of African warriors determined to kill him.

Although he isn’t white, that’s basically the role of Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) in Apocalypto. After his village is ravaged by a war party of Mayans, he must contrive to escape the fatal altar and fight his way back to his pregnant wife and young son. The plot concocted by Gibson and cowriter Farhad Safinia is basically the same as Wilde’s, even though the capture and chase are much more drawn out and the detail far richer.

As we have come to expect from Gibson epics, the blood flows like wine, but this time the violent action is far better choreographed than anything he’s attempted before.

Despite its emphasis on heads rolling down pyramids and heavy facial piercings, the history behind Apocalypto isn’t too shoddy, despite the last-minute arrival of the Spaniards (who did, in fact, land during the final days of the postclassical Mayan empire).

There is, however, one slightly chilling aspect to this extremely brief sequence. Considering the writer-director’s extreme Catholic views, one can’t help wondering if he shares Paul Claudel’s infamous conviction that the coming of Christianity to the New World was an unambiguously good thing, despite the millions of innocent lives that paid for this forced conversion.

To be fair, Apocalypto’s ending is ambiguous in this regard, but the question nonetheless remains.