"A historian must be two things..."

Professor Julius Stokes always said, "A historian must be two things. He must be right and he must be accurate." Stokes was dead on. It is all well and good to level criticisms at Mel Gibson all day and all night. You can criticize him for driving while drunk (or drinking in the first place, if you so choose). You can criticize him for making stupid comments. I do not grant the "while drunk" caveat because that sort of goes with the territory. I have heard of a lot of people saying stupid things while drunk but it is a rare, perhaps unique experience for a drunk person to say something brilliant. To me, using "s/he was drunk/stoned/high" is a cop-out, a lame excuse for unacceptable behavior.
Now Gibson is being criticized for his portrayal of Mayan civilization. In the interest of full disclosure I will say I have no intention of seeing the movie. From the first pre-view I have had no intention of doing so. My reasons are simple: I have never been into the bone through the nose look, I avoid "bloody" movies as much as possible (Gibson has a long history of blood-drenched movies: Braveheart, The Patriot come to mind immediately), and worst of all...it just never appealed to me as interesting.
With that said...I find the criticisms listed to be ridiculous and demeaning to the criticizers, not Gibson. How is it I keep coming across as an apologist for people I really have no feeling towards one way or the other? Aggh...here we go again.
If you want to avoid stereotyping as a bloody group of people...then don't be a bloody group of people at the time being portrayed. If you don't want to be represented as having performed human sacrifices then perhaps you would be better served to have never performed human sacrifices. Unfortunately for the complainers, for the period of history...he is correct.
The Mayan civilization performed so many human sacrifices that extant descriptions of the priests talk of how the ubiquitous blood matted their hair, was caked on steps...it was everywhere. If anything...Gibson probably will not show ENOUGH sacrifices or blood to truly represent the horrors.
The objections raised are neither right about being stereotyped as they are today...nor accurate about what their civilization was. This is actually important. When people complain about being portrayed accurately they lessen the impact of legitimate complaints. If someone today protrayed concurrent Mayan civilization in this manner I would be part of the voices of outrage. But as it stands...this is no less accurate than say...a movie that portrayed middle age Catholicism, particularly in Spain as being repressive and cruelly torturing "heretics" with barbaric things such as water wheels, racks, iron maidens, etc. I wish someone would make such a movie so I could crack on all the Catholics talking about being misrepresented. I would have some real fun then :-)