Magellan is the kind of film that looks you straight in the eye and says: “Sit down, breathe — we’re going to take our time.”
And time, with Lav Diaz, is not a technical variable; it’s raw material, a belief system, almost a provocation aimed at our caffeine-fueled era.
A long, contemplative account of the irrational yet stubborn quest of one of history’s most famous explorers, Magellan moves forward like a slow but inexorable tide.
Everything here is sumptuous: the breathtaking beauty of the images, the almost obsessive perfection of the framing, and above all the overwhelming sense that the tragedies are not meant to surprise us — only to fall upon us, inevitably.
We are in the sixteenth century.
Magellan, a Portuguese explorer rejected by his own king (nothing feeds ambition quite like refusal), convinces the Spanish Crown to back his grand voyage eastward.
The film spans key moments of his life: Malacca, Seville, marriage, hope — and then the Philippine expedition, doomed from the start and sealed by death at the Battle of Mactan.
But don’t expect a conventional biopic, complete with psychological arcs and emotional signposting. Lav Diaz has no interest in that whatsoever.
The Magellan Diaz portrays is gradually demystified, reduced to what he also was: an agent of colonial violence, a man hardened by conquest, faith, and a chilling certainty of righteousness.
His intransigence and madness are embodied with striking restraint by Gael García Bernal, far removed from the feverish romanticism of Amores Perros.
Here, his gaze is often empty, opaque, almost lifeless — a gaze that no longer doubts, which may be the most frightening thing of all.
The film is interested neither in psychology nor in spectacle.
Instead, it presents the Pacific crossing as a slow bureaucratic and religious descent into hell: sentences, executions, famine, mutinies.
At one point, Magellan condemns two men to death for “fornication” — colonial horror operates not only on a grand scale, but also in the intimate, in the body.
Between these moments come the letters of Beatriz, a wife already spectral even before Magellan’s departure, haunting the film like a blurred memory, a trembling apparition in his arms.
It is beautiful, sad, almost unreal.
Visually, Magellan is a feast.
The cinematography, shared with Artur Tort (best known for his work with Albert Serra), turns every shot into a painting. One thinks of Zurbarán’s chiaroscuro, the mystical frontal compositions of Velázquez, or the vast landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, where human figures dissolve into immensity.
Even a branch swaying at the edge of the frame seems to possess a richer biography than certain historical characters.
Wind, mud, jungle — everything speaks, everything insists.
Diaz is not a filmmaker of individuals — unlike Scorsese or even Herzog — but a filmmaker of History as mythological mass.
And he understands that it would be absurd to strip history of its legendary cloak.
Yet this mysticism is constantly fractured by emptiness and silence.
Here, even the most manic scream cannot slow the march of conquest, territorial appropriation — nor that of resistance.
It is impossible not to think of Manoel de Oliveira, especially Non, or the Vain Glory of Command and The Fifth Empire.
The same frontal engagement with the colonial past, the same refusal of simplistic discourse, the same way of filming History as a frozen theater in which humanity endlessly reenacts its own errors.
Viewers expecting a neat, academic, postcolonial rant can move along: Lav Diaz trusts the intelligence of his audience — and that trust is refreshing.
The film clearly adopts a Filipino perspective, yet Diaz has the elegance (and courage) not to sanctify it. He dares to question the figure of Lapu-Lapu, national hero and symbol of resistance, suggesting that his myth may have been instrumentalized by Rajah Humabon to counter Christian conversion.
When a filmmaker challenges both colonial narratives and national myths, you know you are in good hands.
Yes, Lav Diaz sometimes indulges in extremely long sequences.
Yes, not everyone will endure them. But Magellan deliberately sails against the current of our frantic age.
Radical, sumptuous, at times exhausting, often deeply moving, the film calls for a patience that borders on the spiritual in the face of human violence.
This is not a cinema to be consumed — it is a cinema to be crossed.
I left the film drained, moved, slightly dazed — but profoundly grateful. Because films like Magellan, today, do not explain the world to us.
They force us to look at it longer.
By Giulia Dobre
Paris, January 10th 2026.
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