Pete—I mean “Fang”—gushes about the new trailer for Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.

It’s definitely a beautiful looking film, but the preview tells me nothing about what actually happens, though there are hints of a love story and violence and un-Christian religion. So let’s deconstruct what we’ve been shown in the absence of any actual facts about the film, which I’m too (um…) lazy to go looking for.

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” The civilization in Apocalypto appears to be Mayan or Aztec; and though they may be great in power, we see a lot of violence against the priests’ and rulers’ subjects. The Running Man theme in the trailer when combined with the hints of his blood sacrifice suggests that barbarism is the internal force tugging at society, leaving us with the real mystery of the trailer. Who is the external conqueror? From what we think we know about Mad Mel and the history of Mesoamerica, the external agent could well be the Spanish leading edge of European conquest.

So are we going to get a film about the downtrodden raging against the Man, as we did with Braveheart? Or are we going to get another quasireligious snuff film that apologizes for European conquest by asserting visually that the Aztecs (or whoever they may be) had it coming and needed a redeeming force?