‘Magellan’ REVIEW: A Lav Diaz anti-epic, anti-biopic
‘Magellan’ REVIEW: A Lav Diaz anti-epic, anti-biopic
Gael García Bernal as Ferdinand Magellan | Still taken from the Cannes official website
This review contains minor spoilers for Magellan.
In contemporary Philippine cinema, few voices cut as deeply as Lav Diaz’s. Where other filmmakers might tread lightly across Philippine history’s terrain, he descends into its darkest valleys and the endless fields where memories lie buried, digging into the nation’s wounds and tracing a line of violence from the scars of Martial Law, their echoes in the era of Duterte, and into yet another oppressive age of another Marcos and another Duterte.
His cinema observes with the patience of time itself, unhurried and unadorned, not as mere stylistic flourishes but as a medium for reckoning, demanding that we, as Filipinos, confront and bear the weight of oppression and historical trauma in long, grueling stretches.
More than a storyteller, he has become a chronicler of the Filipino psyche, gathering the fragments of our fractured past and giving shape to traumas that those in power would consign to oblivion. His latest film, Magellan, carries the same burden of excavation, but drives the spade further into time. In tracing how deep the scars run, he leads us back to the fateful moment we first encountered the colonizer who would set our history on a different course: Ferdinand Magellan on his last expedition.
When the Film Academy of the Philippines announced Magellan as the country’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, netizens were quick to raise objections. Many saw the choice as a romanticization of a colonizer and argued that the slot would have been better given to works like Sunshine or Food Delivery, films that speak directly to contemporary Filipino struggles. These concerns are understandable, but fortunately, completely unfounded, because Diaz’s treatment of Magellan is anything but romantic. His gaze is cold and unsparing, stripped of heroism and spectacle, avoiding both glorification and caricature.
When we first see Magellan, he lies injured and disheveled on a dark, cold beach at Malacca, littered with corpses in the aftermath of an unseen battle. There is no triumphant fanfare, only exhaustion and human fragility. If he were whimpering in pain, the crashing waves and the howling wind would surely swallow it. The camera holds steady, unmoving, refusing to linger on the lines of pain etched on Ferdinand’s face, showing instead the slow, uneven limp as he is carried away from the shore.
It strips him of grandeur, placing him alongside the indifferent landscape and the nameless dead. Diaz maintains this same measured distance throughout the film, as he does in his other works, presenting each character not as someone with whom we might converse, but as figures whose choices unfold before us, to be observed, weighed, and reckoned with.
And when the film does bring us close to Magellan, it is only to reveal his utter coldness, whether in his silent derision of an indigenous people’s boogeyman or in moments of cruelty that unfold off-screen. The beheading of a subordinate accused of sodomy, the wailings of marooned mutineers cursing him while also begging for mercy — each registers less as events than as gauges of his indifference. The film lingers not on the violence itself but on Magellan’s lack of care, forcing us to confront the ruthless, unflinching core of the man. The film makes its intention clear, instead of a tale of heroism or villainy, this is an act of demystification, a meditation on the human toll of conquest.
To inhabit this vision, Gael García Bernal sheds the magnetic presence that has made him one of the most sought-after actors in the world. He becomes measured and mundane, a mere man whose authority is inseparable from his ego and delusions. It is a stark contrast to the Hollywood approach in films like Killers of the Flower Moon, where morally corrupt men are framed as star vehicles. In such films, the sins of conquest and exploitation can become secondary to the charisma of actors like Leonardo DiCaprio or Robert De Niro, turning tales of men who preyed on the oppressed into acting showcases.
Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon) stares at a pile of discarded anitos | Still taken from the Cannes official website
But the coldness of Diaz’s gaze applies only to the moral and emotional distance he maintains; visually, the film is anything but austere. In collaboration with cinematographer Artur Tort, each frame is as if God himself were touching the landscape and working with the two, letting the sun and its natural light strike just for the perfect shot. Through meticulous composition, Diaz and Tort render beaches, rivers, forests, and sites scarred by violence into frames of hypnotic beauty. The steady, drawn-out camerawork lets time stretch, allowing the full weight of Magellan’s actions to emerge without artifice.
The effect is further amplified by the sound design of Emmanuel Bonnat and Cecil Buban. The crash of waves, the rustle of the wind, the patter of rain — each element animates the world, making the land and seascapes feel alive. In this way, the environment itself becomes a witness, indifferent yet vividly present. This is at its most potent in the stretch across Patagonia and the Pacific, where Magellan and his crew are battered by storms and sickness at sea, confined within their galleon as hunger and paranoia gnaw.
Here, the murderous nature of imperial ambition turns inward: violence no longer directed at lands ripe for plunder, but at themselves, as the expedition unravels under the pressure of survival. The ordeal is punishing to witness. Only minutes pass on screen, yet it feels like an eternity, echoing the slow, suffocating passage of time the crew must have endured.
But perhaps Diaz’s most striking act of demystification does not lie in his anti-epic, anti-biopic rendering of Magellan, but in his reinterpretation of Lapu-Lapu, long enshrined in our textbooks as the first Filipino hero.
It is a deliberate provocation, meant to unsettle the narratives we memorized from Asya: Pag-usbong ng Kabihasnan and other primers, pushing us to re-examine the histories we thought we knew. Its historicity will surely invite debate, but that task belongs to the historians. For me, it is less an act of revisionism than something symbolic. A narrative conceit that gives center stage to Enrique of Malacca, a figure who surfaces only at the margins of Antonio Pigafetta’s account yet may have a stronger claim than Magellan himself to being the first person to circumnavigate the globe.
Played with quiet force by Amado Arjay Babon, Enrique is a presence torn between rage, grief, and the fractured loyalties of a displaced native yearning for a home. Debate endures as to whether he hailed from Malacca or Cebu, but Diaz uses that very uncertainty as the space to imagine his freedom.
By reframing the Lapu-Lapu myth, Diaz dismantles the image of the first Filipino strongman, a figure whose legacy has too often been invoked to prop up a macho culture that feeds the rise of the Dutertes, Ampatuans, Marcoses, Revillas, Estradas, and just about any political dynasty that you can name. And in its place, he opens room for Enrique — not conqueror but conquered, not oppressor but oppressed — to stand as the symbolic counterpoint, a figure of emancipation rather than domination.
Ângela Azevedo as Beatriz Barbosa | Still taken from the Cannes official website
Though stirring and even empowering as it is to follow Enrique’s journey from Europe back to his homeland, his characterization feels frustratingly thin, especially considering where Diaz leaves him. The same can be said of Beatriz Barbosa (Ângela Azevedo), Magellan’s wife, whose soft but haunting presence shadows the explorer’s undoing yet never extends into a life of her own. Both feel like casualties of the concessions Diaz had to make with the devil — I mean — with the European backers who pressed for a shorter cut to fit the demands of festivals and theaters.
Even so, Magellan remains unapologetically a Lav Diaz film, uncompromising in its gaze and staggering in its scope. And somewhere out there, as the filmmaker himself has confirmed, a fuller cut awaits — the film as it was meant to unfold, patient and unyielding, A true Lav Diaz film in true Malay time.
Magellan is now showing in cinemas.
