Now it is time for the Maya to shine, but they are a more mysterious people who finally get star billing in Mel Gibson's new film ''Apocalypto.'' How do they do as a civilization? Not so nice.

''Apocalypto'' depicts the Maya as a super-cruel, psycho-sadistic society on the skids, a ghoulscape engaged in widespread slavery, reckless sewage treatment and bad rave dancing, with a real lust for human blood.

This is a problem because most scholars, while acknowledging the violence of this pre-Columbian society, applaud the Maya as among the New World's most sophisticated and subtle civilizations. They were, especially at their height around A.D. 800, remarkable Stone Agers who erected avant-garde cities in the jungles of Mexico and Central America, created sumptuous art, practiced a precise astronomy and developed a written language.

''Apocalypto's'' focus on the more, shall we say, extreme hobbies of the Maya (i.e., removal of still operating body parts) is giving the community of Maya researchers the fits.

''It is a shocking movie to us,'' says Stephen Houston, professor of anthropology at Brown University who has spent years excavating sites in Mexico and Central America.

The main gripe, says Houston, is that ''Apocalypto'' will make a bad impression on the general public. ''For millions of people this might be their first glimpse of the Maya,'' he says. ''This is the impression that is going to last. But this is Mel Gibson's Maya. . . . This is not the Maya we know.''

Gibson's consultant was respected Mayanist Richard Hansen, a professor at Idaho State University and president of the Foundation for Anthropological Research and Environmental Studies, which does preservation work and study in Guatemala. Gibson, a generous contributor, sits on its board.

''For the most part it is very accurate,'' Hansen says. ''I was amazed at the level of detail, the stone tools, gourds, iguana skins, strung up turkeys, just amazed.'' Yet ''there were things I didn't like that they went ahead and did anyway,'' he says. ''There was a lot of artistic license taken.''

Separating Maya from Mel

So where do the Maya end and where does Mel begin?

* Gibson shows grisly human sacrifice, and yes, the Maya were into it. But: The humans being chopped into nibbles were more likely to be royals and elites, not common forest dwellers like the film's Jaguar Paw, says Brown University anthropology professor Stephen Houston.

* The film depicts human sacrifice on a large scale and shows an open-pit grave filled with hundreds of headless dead. But: ''We have no evidence of mass graves,'' says Karl Taube, anthropology professor at the University of California at Riverside.

* Gibson includes what appears to be widespread slavery. Masses of gloomy, starved captives are seen toiling under heavy loads to build ceremonial centers. But: ''We have no evidence of large numbers of slaves,'' Taube says. Rather, most Mayanists suspect the pyramids and the like were built by free Maya who saw it as a civic duty.

* Finally, the Mayanists say the film appears confused about when events take place. One of the great mysteries of the Maya is why their civilization ''collapsed'' around A.D. 900. The current thinking is that collapse had many fathers: drought, deforestation, disease, overpopulation, warfare, social disruption. And Gibson's movie includes a little riff on them all.

But Gibson sets his film at the time of European contact in the early 1500s, when the first Spanish expeditions arrived on Maya shores. What wiped out the Maya in the 1500s was the Spanish, who brought European disease and fought for decades to pacify the Maya.