There’s usually a fun element to fictionalizing history. Imagine a world where Dwight Eisenhower shot Adolf Hitler to end World War II in place of the führer’s bunker suicide, or John Wilkes Booth being stopped by a good Samaritan who saved Abraham Lincoln’s life and allowed the 16th president to deliver on his promise of “malice toward none” during Reconstruction.
Hollywood has tried its hand at historical fiction on numerous occasions. Magneto in X-Men: Days of Future Past tried to stop the bullet that killed John F. Kennedy, thus validating the magic bullet theory and that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. And Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds offered an alternative history where Hitler and the entire German high command are eliminated in one massive theater fire and bombing.
But the latest offering in Hollywood’s historical fiction canon does not fantasize about killing Nazis or stopping a presidential assassination. Instead, Warner Bros. Animation is set to release Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires, a fictionalized account of Hernan Cortez’s conquest of Mexico, where the invaded Aztecs and their cult of human sacrifice turn to Batman as their salvation, while the conquistadors who stopped this barbarism turn into villains from the Batman rogues gallery.
According to the online synopsis of the film, which is set for an October release, an Aztec boy, driven by grief after his father, an Aztec chieftain, is killed by Cortez, is chosen by a bat god to confront the invading Spaniards and defend the Aztec empire. Cortez, in the meantime, becomes the villain Two-Face.
Imagining the white conquistadors as merely a deranged and greedy lot who committed a mass genocide against a sophisticated and peaceful people is the sort of historical revisionism that one would expect from the faculty lounge of UC-Berkeley, not a comic book-inspired movie.
The Cortez expedition in 1519 remains one of the most audacious and remarkable feats in history. With a small band of several hundred Spaniards, Cortez managed to conquer an empire of millions. Even with the technological advantages that his expedition had, the success of this conquest was nothing short of miraculous. But it did not come without help. Few would dispute that the expedition would have failed if it weren’t for the thousands of natives who joined his cause to conquer the Aztec empire.
That’s because the Aztec empire was a murderous death cult that was brutally oppressive and subjugated the villages within its reach, forcing them to provide a steady stream of victims for ritualistic human sacrifices. When the Spaniards came, Cortez had little trouble rallying natives to his cause, as he promised an end to the depravity and forced the Aztecs to end the practice of human sacrifice.
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Warner Bros. Animation could have told a fictionalized story in which the chieftain was hauled off to be a human sacrifice, and his son took on the mantle of Batman to help Cortez conquer the death cult that ruled Mexico at the beginning of the 16th century.
Instead, the studio would have you believe that the civilization that cut the beating hearts out of innocent men, women, and children was actually the good guys, while the white men who stopped them were a band of murderous psychopaths. After all, maintaining the narrative that white men in history were evil and preyed on the fictionalized innocent and peaceful indigenous people was more important than an honest accounting of history.