“Your water has no teeth,” Jaguar Paw says. “Our medicine is fire and isolation. Teach my people how the metal sticks work, or I will feed you to the bullet ants.”

is not merely an action film; it is a fable about how civilizations fall from within before they are conquered from without. The arrival of the Spanish ships serves as the ultimate resolution to the film's message—a "new beginning" (as defined by Gibson) that changes everything.

One of the captured Spanish soldiers, a young monk named , is spared. He knows how to read the “sickness clouds”—the smallpox that drifts ahead of the main convoy.