Magellan

MAGELLAN   ***1/2

Lav Diaz

2025

IDEA:  Ferdinand Magellan and his crews wreak havoc on indigenous populations as they seek to bring Christianity to the global East.

BLURB:  It takes quite some time before the nominal hero of Magellan is given his close-up. Aside from a brief, wryly askance angle of him sleeping, he is seen in the first portions of Lav Diaz’s film wandering far afield in the deep-focus frames, marginalized by a foreground of merciless jungle and the lifeless bodies of the indigenous Malacca people his expedition has massacred. Even when Gael García Bernal’s Portuguese general assumes a more prominent visual and narrative role, Diaz continues to subvert his authority in a strategy of inversion that is anti-colonial at its core. Rebelling against “Great Man” historiography and Age of Discovery romanticism, the filmmaker depicts a grinding, sickly, recursive imperialist project carried out by petty, insecure Europeans ready to kill each other before even reaching the other side of the ocean. In the mesmerizing scenes at sea, Diaz films in low-angle shots that might seem reverential if not for the savage behavior of the men within them. He lingers on bodies battered by both the elements and intramural violence, on exhaustion and boredom and quarrels scored to nothing but a creaking ship. The extended duration, static camera, and elision of dramatic spectacle serve to undermine any sense of progress or accomplishment; this is a story, ultimately, of Western ideological and geopolitical failure. That failure becomes the (temporary) triumph of the indigenes in a last chapter that portrays their righteous uprising and the creation of a new national myth. Magellan also creates its own, cinematic myth, one that fascinatingly runs counter to both Western and Filipino grand narratives. Underlying the stunningly immersive sensory experience is the fundamental problematic of how history is written, imagined, and promulgated, and Diaz is bold enough to make his film not an answer, but another question.