Give Mel Gibson his due as a director — this is one of the best films I’ve seen in 2006. And it’s set in a totally alien culture — or at least one that I wish was totally alien.

Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a young Indian, is taken prisoner by a group of Mayan soldiers harvesting outsiders to be used as human sacrifices. Along with the other adults of his village (children are left behind; one wonders what became of them) they are marched in a coffle to the local Mayan city. Most are saved from sacrifice by a conveniently-occurring solar eclipse, apparently a bad omen, but the soldiers are ordered to “dispose” of them. Jaguar Paw escapes, and must make his way home through the jungle, with a Mayan hunting party on his trail; he is driven by a sense of urgency because during the raid he succeeded in hiding his pregnant wife and son in an underground well which will turn into a deathtrap the first time it rains heavily.

There are things I could complain about in this film. Gibson seems intent on visiting all the problems of the more northerly Aztec civilization on the poor Mayas, whose civilization mainly disappeared a few hundred years before the time at which this film is supposedly set. The night after the eclipse, the camera shows us a full moon over the jungle, a physical impossibility. The film at its beginning promises to show us the collapse of a civilization because of its own internal decadence; but the snapshot we see of Mayan civilization, while it does show decadence, does not show a civilization in collapse (though the last few scenes suggest the possibility of an approaching external crisis).

But all in all this does not matter. What we have is the adventure of one young man, ripped from his home, trying to get back to save his wife and child(ren) from almost certain death. This is a much more universal story than the collapse of a civilization, and one with which we can identify.

Some critics have emphasized the bloodiness of the film. Gibson pulls no punches, but — if we substitute the word “Aztec” for “Mayan” — I don’t think he exaggerates them, either. The most heart-rending (literally!) scene in the film, which critics have excoriated, was also shown, as someone else pointed out in a review, in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and nobody complained then.

All in all, a film worth seeing — and, later, having at home.