‘Magellan’ Review: Gael García Bernal in Lav Diaz’s Dark Chronicle of Conquest

We are taught about it in school, yet it remains almost impossible to imagine the shock. We study it, then later revise or question those notions, but it is still difficult to convey the impact that the arrival of other human beings—so radically different in appearance, language, customs, and means—must have had on the inhabitants of the so-called “New Worlds.” Strangers arriving from the sea, aboard massive vessels, carrying unknown weapons. The only contemporary comparison that comes to mind is the landing of an alien spacecraft. That, precisely, is the sensation conveyed by Magellan from its very first moments: shock, disbelief, gods answering a prayer that perhaps should never have been uttered.

A naked woman runs screaming through a village in Malacca, in what is now the Philippines, after seeing what she calls “white men” arrive. Her voice multiplies, excitement spreads through the community. She announces it literally: “The gods have heard our prayers.” But the next significant image—appearing a few minutes later, bearing in mind that this is a Lav Diaz film—shows a massacre across the length and breadth of that fishing village. The strange men from distant lands have arrived, and they have slaughtered hundreds.

That is the primary experience Diaz seeks to convey through much of this story, centered on two different voyages undertaken by Fernão de Magalhães, the famous Portuguese explorer. The men reach the Philippines, take possession of the land, drink constantly, imprison the locals in scenes that evoke Apocalypse Now!, and quickly proclaim themselves rulers of this new “kingdom.” Played by Gael García Bernal, Magellan begins the film as a young, taciturn man under the command of General Afonso de Albuquerque (Roger Koza), who is the first to articulate the geopolitics of conquest before collapsing drunkenly into the mud.

Lav Diaz’s film combines the observational tempos that define the Filipino filmmaker’s work—he is, after all, known for extremely long films (this one runs 160 minutes, short by his standards, though there is reportedly a nine-hour version)—with a somewhat more classical and traditional narrative structure, always on his own terms, centered on a key historical event. Do not expect large-scale battles, action set pieces, or spectacular landings. What Diaz stages, at least during the Philippine portion of the story, is a different kind of collision: personal, cultural, and religious.

Years later, now an important figure in Portugal—married, with children, and settled for a long period—Magellan will lead, with the backing of the Spanish crown, his most famous expedition: the one that will take him through the strait that now bears his name, a journey that would last three years. The plan was to reach the Moluccas (in present-day Indonesia) by crossing a passage south of the American continent, through what we now know as Patagonia. Though it is now a settled historical fact—the first circumnavigation of the globe—at the time it was a gamble that pushed the expedition’s sanity and endurance to their limits.

The film’s second section is devoted to that long voyage and to the difficulties and internal conflicts that arose at sea. Almost none of the historical context is explained or spelled out. Instead, the film plunges the viewer into the experience itself: drifting toward madness, losing composure as time passes with barely a glimpse of solid ground. Religious clashes, death sentences handed down in sodomy trials, mutinies, despair, anguish, the slow erosion of reason and mental stability—these become the core of this stage, which does not trace the journey step by step but constructs it as a single, nearly delirious experience.

The third section returns Magellan to the Philippines, now as a leader attempting a more negotiated and political form of conquest. This, too, inevitably explodes over religious conflict, since converting the locals to Christianity was central to his mission, adding yet another layer of tension to those of control and subjugation. While Diaz does not portray Magellan through overt psychological critique—this is more a cinematic than a psychological portrait—the film’s point of view clearly aligns with the locals. Beyond what the explorer and conqueror may see as noble “educational” intentions—or, less innocently, obedience to royal orders—the results of his colonizing efforts are laid bare, with consequences that persist to this day.

Magellan is a cinematic portrait of these expeditions, these experiences, this descent into madness. Although it was initially announced as a film more focused on Magellan’s relationship with his wife Beatriz, that thread remains secondary in a work that, despite Diaz’s restrained filmmaking style, maintains a relatively traditional, almost classical, three-act structure. First, the young Magellan on his early voyage, discovering how the world works and how poorly his superiors control it. Then the negotiator in Portugal, attempting to push forward a risky project in the face of resistance. And finally the dominant figure of the expedition itself, increasingly manipulative, aggressive, and violent, capable of executing his own mutineers as well as local “heretics.”

This journey into madness—so familiar in literary and cinematic accounts of colonial conquest, often centered on Europeans pushing into territories unknown to them—is captured perfectly by the film, both in the Philippine episodes and in the voyage itself, always teetering on the edge of chaos. Speaking a mixture of Portuguese and Spanish, or shifting fluidly between the two, García Bernal never needs to dominate through sheer presence or volume. His authority comes from conviction: the certainty that he alone sees the path clearly. He knows the passage to the Indies exists, and he will pursue it despite near-universal opposition. He is equally convinced of the necessity of imposing Christianity—and, spoiler alert for anyone unfamiliar with basic history, that does not end particularly well.

Magellan recontextualizes Diaz’s cinema and demonstrates how a filmmaker can take on more complex, seemingly distant challenges without losing his essence: his way of filming, of capturing space and the world he depicts. It recalls Jauja, by Lisandro Alonso, another case in which a director enters a more ambitious, ostensibly unfamiliar project without abandoning the core of his artistic vision.

The film does not overtly strive to be more “politically correct” than historical accounts of these expeditions, though that perspective is embedded in its very conception—in the simple fact that it is Diaz who tells this story. Magellan is a film that approaches the complexity of the world through lived experience, through a present-tense narrative shared by both the explorers and the Filipinos at the moment of a collision that would change history, and whose consequences continue to resonate today.