…it’d be Apocalypto.
Plot as follows.
WARNING: SPOILERS
So, we meet a guy. He’s a hunter. He hunts things, like a pig. He might have a name, but for right now, we don’t know; this is not important, for we know that he hunts, and also that he makes another hunter eat pig balls and laughs at him. He is also the son of an old guy, who might also have a name, and who also hunts. While hunting, they see some people they don’t know. The hunters and those people look at each other for a while. Yup. Lookin’ at each other. That’s what they’re doin’. Got some music goin’ on. Lookin’ at each other. Then the new people give the hunters some fish. The old guy takes this as a cue to introduce himself. He is Flint Sky, and he has hunted these forests since he came of age, and his father hunted these forests before him, and his son, Jaguar Paw, will hunt them after he is gone. So, they do have names, and now we know them. The new people ask for permission to pass, and the hunters tell them they can, so they do. They pass. Yup. They’re passin’. Hunters are lookin’ at ‘em. Watching ‘em pass. That’s happenin’. They look kinda beat up. And they’re passin’. So, they finish passing, and then the hunters walk back to the village. The village has some more people in it; they don’t have any names. They’re there though. Flint Sky tells Jaguar Paw that the people who passed were afraid, and that’s bad. So, remember, there’s our theme: fear bad.
Anyway, the guy who ate the boar balls has a wife; she doesn’t have a name, but he’s got her. Jaguar Paw has one too, and they have a kid, and she’s pregnant with another kid. So anyway, all the villagers listen to an old guy talk about how mankind will destroy the world, then they dance, then they go to sleep. Then they wake up. Then some other people – we don’t know who they are, but they look pretty mean – come to kill them. The mean people set the village on fire and kill most of the nameless townsfolk, then they tie the rest to sticks by their necks. In the midst of this, Jaguar Paw puts his family in a hole. It’s a pretty big hole, about 100 feet deep. Not sure what they have it for, but they do, and he puts his family in it. Anyway, after his family is in the hole, he tries to fight the mean people, and he almost kills this one guy before the Head Mean Person stops him. The guy he almost killed spends about three minutes snarling at him evilly to let us know that he Will Not Forget This.
So, now everyone from the village who’s still alive, which includes Jaguar Paw and the guy who ate the boar balls, is tied to the sticks, and then they start walking. They walk for about 30 minutes. While they’re walking, the men occasionally see their wives, and they’re sad, and their wives are sad. Or they see some kids, and the kids are sad, and the men are sad, and their wives are sad. Everyone’s sad because they’re captured. This is established. I cannot overstress its importance. Everyone captured, everyone sad. Very sad, captured, and walking. We got this? Good. So, they walk some more. The guy tied behind Jaguar Paw on the stick is about to die because there’s a hole in his stomach, and whenever they’re walking in places where dying would be inconvenient for anyone tied to a stick with you – such as a cliffside path, or the middle of a river – the guy starts to die, and Jaguar Paw tries not to get pulled off the cliff or into the river while Guy Who Will Not Forget This looks on with an evil grin that tells us that he Has Not Forgotten This. Eventually, they walk to a place where white powder is being farmed. There are some rocks, and there are big piles of white powder that seems to come from the rocks. The people who are farming the white powder are covered in it, and they look sad, as though they do not enjoy farming the white powder or being covered in it. So, having visited the white powder farm and looked at it, the mean people and the stick-tied people keep walking, until they get to the farmer’s market. There, the captured women are auctioned as slaves, and they are sad about this. The men watch the women being sold, and they are sad about it as well. The men and the women look at each other, and they are sad.
Then the men are painted blue and taken to a pyramid. There is a massive crowd at the bottom of this pyramid, and about five guys in goofy masks on top of it. Also on top of it is an old guy who’s tripping on peyote. One of the masked guys occasionally rolls a human head down the pyramid and into the crowd, and the crowd cheers. He does this for a while. Yup. Got some heads. Goin’ down a pyramid. Bouncin’ on down. People cheerin’. Sure do like those heads. So, the Head Mean Guy takes the blue people to the top of the pyramid. The head tossing guy grabs one of them, bends him over a post, cuts out his heart, cuts off his head and tosses it down the pyramid. Crowd cheers. Still likin’ the heads. Head Tosser grabs Jaguar Paw and gets ready to cut out his heart. Peyote Guy stands up and starts yelling some crap. Everyone looks up and acts extremely surprised, which is understandable, once we see that they are looking at what has to be the Fastest Solar Eclipse In The Universe; the sun goes from completely visible to totally obscured in about ten seconds. Then the moon pauses in front of the sun for a few seconds. Maybe it was tired from its sprint. Anyway, this is nice of the moon to do, since it gives Head Tosser time to decide that the eclipse is a sign from the gods that they don’t need to sacrifice anyone else, and yell that down to the crowd. Then he asks the sun to come out again if he’s right. It does, taking about the same ten seconds for the moon to get completely out of its way. Crowd cheers. Likin’ the magic moon powers.
One of the masked pyramid guys tells Head Mean Guy to dispose of the rest of the blue people, so he takes them to a big dirt rectangle in front of a cornfield, cuts them loose, and has them try to run to the cornfield while the rest of the mean people throw spears and shoot arrows at them. The guy who ate the boar balls gets speared and dies. Jaguar Paw gets speared in the gut and falls down, so Head Mean Guy’s son goes to kill him. But Jaguar Paw has super powers, so he’s okay, and he breaks the spear, takes the point of it, and slashes HMG’s son’s throat. Then he takes the spear out of his gut and gets up and runs away. Head Mean Guy runs after him. He runs. They run. Lots of running. Jaguar Paw gets tired of running, so he hides in a tree, and the mean guys run past him. But there’s a jaguar in the tree, and it gets pissed at him, because he is in its tree, and jaguars do not like that. (Jaguars live in trees?) We see the mean guys again, and they figure out that Jaguar Paw did not come this way, and that he’s probably in a tree. They’re wrong, though, because actually Jaguar Paw has come out of the tree and is running away from a pissed off jaguar. Jaguars can run at about 45 mph, but Jaguar Paw has super powers, so he’s staying ahead of it (he’d be beating it, but you know, the whole spear through the gut thing). The mean guys see Jaguar Paw running at them, and elect to stand there until he runs past them, at which point they run after him. They catch up to him pretty quickly – they have super powers too, and they haven’t been speared or anything – and are promptly hit with the old Jaguar-to-the-face attack. JAGUAR TO THE FACE! It kills the guy whose face it lands upon, then the other mean guys kill it.
Jaguar Paw keeps running and makes back to the river, and sees…well, he sees this, so he jumps over it. He has super powers, so he doesn’t die or break any bones or anything. Then he yells at the mean guys, and that makes them mad, so the Head Mean Guy says that they will jump off the waterfall too. One of the mean guys objects to this, because he doesn’t have super powers, which is unacceptable, so the Head Mean Guy kills him. Then the mean guys jump off the waterfall – apparently there was one other guy who didn’t have super powers, because he dies, but the rest are fine – and so Jaguar Paw runs away some more, then he falls in some quicksand. He tries to save himself, but he fails, and we watch him sink so deep that the fingertips of his outstretched arm no longer reach the surface. But he has super powers, so he reaches up again and grabs the edge and pulls himself out. He then pauses and realizes that he is not afraid because he is Jaguar Paw and this is his forest (which must the the source of his super powers, though he does not mention this explicitly). So, he runs away some more. He gets a frog and makes some poison darts, and uses them to kill one of the mean guys. Guy Who Will Not Forget This notices his teammate die, so he turns and prepares for an epic duel (see, it’s all epic-ey because we know he Has Not Forgotten This). They run at each other, and Jaguar Paw takes an axe to the head, but he has super powers, so this doesn’t bother him; he slides past the Guy and grabs the axe of the guy he killed, then turns and kills GWWNFT.
More running. Then, disaster strikes: it starts to rain. It is unclear why this is a disaster, until we remember that Jaguar Paw’s family is still in a hole (there have been occasional shots of them being in the hole throughout the movie to remind us of this, but it’s easy to forget), and it’s starting to fill up with water. You would think that this would be a good thing since they were kind of lacking a way out of the hole, and they needed to get out so they could get food and not die, and people float in water. But they don’t float when…they’re having a baby! So, Mrs. Jaguar Paw goes into labor, while Jaguar Paw runs to the hole to save them before they drown. He gets to the hole, and he looks at them, and he sees that, yup, they’re in the hole, and they’re gonna drown. So, he runs away again. While he’s running away, the mean guys start to catch up to him, and they shoot an arrow through his neck. But he has super powers, so he’s okay, and he takes the arrow out. The Head Mean Guy is annoyed by this, so he charges at Jaguar Paw, but he is killed by that giant spiked swinging arm trap that is right there.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Jaguar Paw has a baby. Yay!
Jaguar Paw runs away some more, followed by the two remaining mean guys. He runs to the beach, where he sees some boats and Cortez, who is standing at the front of a boat and looking at them stoically. The two mean guys are confused by Cortez, and while they are looking at him funny, Jaguar Paw runs back and gets his family out of the hole (it is unclear how he does this, but he has super powers) and they go into the woods. Mrs. Jaguar Paw sees the boats and asks if they should go to them. Jaguar Paw says that they should not, and that they should go into the woods. So they do.
The End.
It’s brilliant. You should all go watch it now.