X

Great sites

Anything Hollywood

Atomic Popcorn

Banned in Hollywood

Bits & Pieces

Blockbuster Buzz

Book mistakes

CanMag

The Daily Column

Daily Stab

Defamer

Double Viking

EHOWA

The Evil Beet

Film Drunk

Filmofilia

Filmspotting

Foundry Music

Game mistakes

Geek Tyrant

Gone Hollywood

Hollyscoop

Hollywood Outbreak

I Am Bored

I Love Bacon

Joblo movie news

Movie Banter

Movie Buzz

Movie spoilers

Movie timeline

Other crap

Screenjunkies

Sky movie reviews

Something Really Funny

Tengossip

Trailer Addict

Unreality Magazine

Virtually Existing

Mistakes

At 48:28, there's a shot of a large bird on a rock in a river, a Cattle Egret, and it flies across screen and goes out of view on the left. Cattle Egrets are originally from Europe and were not present in the Americas until around 1877. See more...

Mistake pictures

Movie Mistakes blog

Popular blog posts:

Top 15 biggest Harry Potter film mistakes

The biggest mistakes in the Harry Potter movies

15 biggest mistakes in Titanic

The 20 biggest Friends mistake pictures

10 Twilight mistakes in pictures

Apocalypto (2006) - 17 corrections

Directed by Mel Gibson (add more)

Genres: Action, Adventure, Drama

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

Mistakes
Corrections
Questions
Submit
In the scene where Jaguar Paw's wife is stuck in the cave, 2 animals are fighting and one falls into the cave. These animals were Tasmanian Devils and are only found in the island Tasmania off the coast of Australia. [Those animals were tapirs, and are very common in the Central American jungles.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
When Jaguar Paw runs through the corn field on the way to the jungle, he falls into the ravine filled with dead bodies. While he is surveying the carnage a red flash appears on screen. Upon stepping to this frame it shows a man lying amongst the bodies wearing blue jeans, a red and white striped shirt and hat, and holding a similarly striped umbrella. [The scene with the modern man never happens, it's a web myth and the photos online are suppose to be Wally from "Where's Wally?".]
Edit Time
Before jumping down the waterfall, Jaguar Paw as well as his pursuers are standing only ankle-deep in water right before the abyss. Considering how much water is coming down, it's unthinkable that you'd only get your feet wet. [But it is not impossible, the water if you look is running very fast behind Jaguar Paw. The water would not pool up before the waterfall unless it was being blocked so the water remains at a certain level before it goes over the falls. It is a river, hence nothing to contain the water.]
Edit
When Jaguar Paw is escaping and is at the top of the waterfall about to jump, several shots show a very modern white cruise ship in the background. [The thing you see isn't a cruise ship, it is part of the river where there are some rapids. The shape of that part of the river does resemble the shape of a ship, but if you zoom in you will see that it is only part of the rapids and not a cruise ship.]
Edit
In various close-ups of the male Indians' faces, you will see tiny but thick hairs "growing back again" in the mustache-part of the face like after-some-time shaved. In real life, American Indians couldn't grow beards or mustaches; it was a genetical condition of their race. [Several of my friends are aboriginal to the Americas, and while they, for the most part, don't have thick facial hair, most do have hairs in the places many other races have mustaches and beards. In fact, a few of them have mustaches, even if they look like an average Caucasian 16 year old's.]
Edit Corrected by rswarrior
When the woman gives birth in the watery pit, the baby is quite big compared to how small the woman's belly was before the birth. [At term, there is very little correlation between the size of a pregnant woman's abdomen and the size of the baby. A large portion of the baby's body has moved into the mother's pelvis 2-3 weeks prior to delivery (the "drop" into position for delivery). The newborn seen in the movie is certainly consistent with the size of the near-term abdomen.]
Edit
When prisoners are taken to the sacrifice temple, Jaguar Paw's friend says something about getting revenge in Hell. Hell is a Christian concept, thus there is no way Indians could have used it at that time, before the Spanish Conquest. [It says Hell in the ENGLISH subtitles because the subtitles are supposed to help ENGLISH speakers to understand the movie. If the subtitles had said the Mayan equivalent of Hell, ENGLISH speakers would not have known what it meant.]
Edit Corrected by Blibbetyblip
Even though the entire tribe was taken captive at the beginning of the film, when Jaguar Paw returns home he is able to kill the bad guy using the trap that killed the wild boar in the beginning. In the interest of safely, it is unlikely that such a dangerous trap would be left set all the time, and the men of the tribe were not out hunting at the time of their capture. Further, it is doubtful that one man would be able to set such a trap by himself, especially in the amount of time shown, so it is unlikely that Jaguar Paw found the trap sprung and set it up all by himself. [Since OSHA didn't exist at this time, I don't think they were too worried about "safety on the job." They were probably more concerned with catching enough food to survive. They'd leave the traps set to increase their chances of catching more tapir. The hunters knew where the traps were and what the catches looked like; their chances of getting hurt were pretty low.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
The journey of captured people and the war party, brings them on the right side of a river (looking downstream), and they proceed crossing it from right to left. Later, on his journey back home, Jaguar Paw jumps into a waterfall and swims out on the opposite bank again crossing this river from right to left, and yet soon we learn that he is back in his neck of the woods, despite the fact that he crossed two rivers. [Rivers can divide up and rejoin themselves. Jaguar Paw took a much different route home than the one he left by. It's a big jungle.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
After Jaguar Paw is captured and tied up by the raiders, he looks over towards the hole and the man he killed. When a guard goes over to check the man, you can see that the "dead" man is very obviously breathing. [So Jaguar Paw didn't kill him outright, he just knocked him unconscious. If the man isn't dead yet, he is certainly in the process of dying.]
Edit Corrected by Phixius
When the baby is being born in the water it doesn't cough or choke afterwards. [The baby has been breathing fluid for 9 months in the womb. It's used to it. Only when the baby begins respiration for a length of time does it begin to choke on water.]
Edit
When the jaguar is killed, the head of the dead animal is on top of the body of the Mayan warrior it had previously mangled. In the following wide shot the animal is several meters away from its prey. [Between seeing the jaguar's head on the warrior and the overhead shot, there is a shot of the other warriors dragging something - dragging the jaguar off the dead guy.]
Edit
Jaguar Paw, apparently severely wounded by an arrow wound to the abdomen, manages to run all night without tiring and to keep ahead of a group of uninjured professional warriors. This seems highly unlikely. [Unlikely, but not impossible. Adrenalin can do amazing things to people. Besides, pretty much any movie in existence requires some suspension of disbelief in order for it to be an interesting movie. I have never yet seen people burst out into song, and a choreographed dance number spontaneously, like in all the musicals ever made.]
Edit
Given they seem to be so close (it takes him less than two days to get home) and so aggressive, it seems unlikely that Jaguar Paw's people have no knowledge of the existence of the Mayan city. [Two days is a big distance to ancient civilizations. They were not nomadic, and did not go far from their home village for hunting, gathering and farming. Before the New World was "discovered" even sailors thought the world ended at the horizon, yet they could have sailed from Europe to North America in a matter of a couple of weeks. Even today, I know people who have never been to Disneyland, even though they live only 20 minutes drive away in the Greater LA area. Some tribes in the Amazon were not discovered until the 20th century, even though there were metropolises within a 3 or 4 day hike through the jungle. Distance makes a big difference if a person or tribe has no need or inclination to explore.]
Edit
When they are sacrificing the captives, they tear out the beating heart of the person. They then hold it up, and the person watches in horror as his own heart is beating. If you ripped out a beating heart, the person's blood pressure would drop to zero right away, and they would black out. [Absolutely wrong. A person who loses all cardiac function instantaneously (say, by having their heart removed, which will do it, every time) will die of cerebral anoxia as the blood circulation and therefore the oxygen supply to the brain fails. Between the removal of the heart and total loss of consciousness the brain will operate on its own stored oxygen reserves, typically allowing fifty to sixty seconds of activity in a resting adult - or in this case, one tied to a sacrificial altar.]
Edit
When Jaguar Paw's wife gives birth, the baby comes out crying. [I was born crying. Not a mistake.]
Edit
When Jaguar Paw returns to the hole where his wife is hiding, where'd the dead guy go? [The dead guy was taken by the monkeys seen earlier fighting for the corpse.]
Edit