Friday, June 13, 2008
article reviews
I enjoyed the article reviews that we did in class on thursday. I found them to be very informative and stimulating. I especially liked the one about human sacrifice within the Aztec civilization. Up until now, the only real exposure i have had to this was through a mel gibson movie (Apocolypto). I then realized that mel gibson is wacko and i probably should not try too hard to gain historical knowledge from his films, as he often times exhibits a strong bias. In this case, he seemed to depict the Aztecs as savages who could not stop killing each other. But the sacrifice scenes were pretty cool. If thier is one thing that Mel Gibson knows how to do it is gratuitous violence, and also embarass himself too.
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2 comments:
While I agree with you that Apocolypto was a little extreme in terms of the arbitrary violence, I do think that some aspects of the movie were accurate. We discussed in the class that sacrifices were often a result of conflict between tribes, and that was depicted accurately. Also, the movie definitely showed the immense power that the Aztec rulers had, which was exercised via human sacrifice.
I too enjoyed the articles presented in class. Throughout the entire article that discussed human sacrifice I kept going back to scenes in Apocolypto in my head. From what I heard in lecture and from the article, the movie seemed realistic to me. The one thing that I cannot remember if it was mentioned in class or in the article was the way in which the sacrifice took place. Did they want the head to roll down the pyramid or was that just something that was falsely depicted in the movie? It would seem that that research must have been done prior to making the movie so Mel Gibson did not look like a complete moron so it would seem that the movie should have accurately depicted Aztec life for the most part.
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