Ferdinand Magellan was never regarded as a great man of history, and Lav Diaz’s surprisingly conventional––if still hypnotically paced––biopic uses genre structure to act as a further repudiation of his legacy. Born out of a long-in-the-works project focused on Magellan’s wife Beatriz, Magellan now functions as an unusual companion-of-sorts: a work you couldn’t mistake for that of any other filmmaker, but one that feels incomplete by definition, frequently making big temporal leaps in a manner that feels at odds with the more cautiously paced work we’ve come to expect from Diaz. At my pre-Cannes screening, the film’s PR representative remarked that every time they showed a work-in-progress cut, it wildly fluctuated in length compared to the last, and the film’s final, Croisette-bound form still has a shadow cast over it by the reported nine-hour, black-and-white film from Beatriz’s perspective which was shot in tandem. This might be why, even at a length considered epic by the standards of most directors––as the joke goes, 156 minutes is a short for Diaz––it only feels like we’re scratching the surface of a more vivid depiction of Magellan’s colonial project, and the fallout both in Portugal and the Philippines.
This isn’t to say Diaz’s unambiguous portrayal of colonialism’s horrors has been elided through the frequent time jumps; even as we leap years between pivotal campaigns in the explorer’s life among consecutive scenes, the victims of each are never glossed-over. The barbarism takes place almost entirely offscreen, an approach which is stark from the introduction, when the residents of a rural Philippine island praise God for the impending arrival of the “white man”––the title card drops, and immediately afterwards we’re faced with dozens of faceless bodies washed up on a shore after a battle that’s not elaborated-upon in great detail. It’s a stark opening which lingers the more Magellan’s personal mission becomes indoctrinating these remote communities with Christianity, the character desperately attempting to downplay his self-awareness that his mission is at odds with the religion’s core tenets.
These two pivotal moments in his life are separated by nearly two decades, but they’re united by Diaz’s justifiably cynical view towards the relationship between religion and colonization, where the human cost of spreading this message is never understated. Again, no sequences of battle are to be found here, just the nameless bodies on the floor of remote villages in their aftermath, peeking lifelessly into frame, a constant reminder of the brutality to which these blasé figures have long been numb. It should be noted that Gael García Bernal’s lead performance is all the stronger the more detached it feels from the history unfolding around Magellan, this flesh-and-blood manifestation of the violent colonial mentality fitting for a movie that considers only death, not the circumstances leading up to it.
Naturally, all my criticisms of conventionality still come with a slow-cinema-shaped asterisk. Diaz never exactly moves through the eras with propulsion. Instead, each sequence feels like an elaborately detailed sketch, all amounting to what still, inescapably, feels like an overview of a pivotal historical figure and the colonial evils of this period––unflinching in what it does document, still far from a comprehensive account. Frustratingly, there are glimmers of richer thematic ideas that might subvert conventions of the “great man” biopic, which remain largely unspoken until Diaz twists the knife with his take on the events leading up to Magellan’s death, toying with historical fact––although, crucially, not entirely revising it––in a fashion that did make me wish we weren’t seeing events from the explorer’s myopic perspective.
It’s a major statement on how cinema repurposes historical tales––often cementing the definitive take on disputed fact, despite narrative liberties taken––trapped inside a minor work. The circumstances surrounding Magellan’s death in the Battle of Mactan only have one recorded eyewitness, and by belatedly making us question the reliability of this sole narrator through his take on events, it gives the illusion of a weightier genre reconstruction than what was actually presented onscreen. Within the body of the work itself, Diaz only appears to twist convention through omission; the one big battle scene is a deliberately anti-climactic static take, shot at a distant remove, of three boats clumsily firing cannons at each other, like the anti-Master and Commander.
As the years pass on Magellan’s Spanish expedition, his wife Beatriz (Ângela Ramos) reappears as a borderline spectral presence, a consistent reminder of the fuller realized perspective which is likely still being brought to fruition in the editing suite. It was through researching her that Diaz’s desire to explore this period came to life, but Magellan can often feel like an obligatory, surprisingly accessible work that would secure funding for his more elaborate epic. There’s much to like here, but I never felt I was seeing a fully-realized vision.
Magellan premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.