'Magellan' review — A mesmeric piece of counter-history

NO FERDINAND IS SAFE in Lav's 'sinema.' The auteur’s contemplative, almost ascetic film language — described correctly but sometimes reductively as “slow,” with lengths going as punishingly long as 10-plus hours — suits the film perfectly, the kind of artistic clap-back fitting for those who design to have history be written in their favor. No sweeping drone shots of the archipelago, no glorious battles for the land, no pedestals for “great men” to step on. Lav makes his biopic of Ferdinand Magellan not about the Portuguese explorer himself, but his outsized ambitions. In a word, this is Lav clocking this colonizer’s tea.

It isn't Lav's first Ferdinand, either. His elegiac "rock opera," Ang Panahon ng Halimaw, depicts a Marcos-like character as a Malignant tumor with an outgrown visage behind that of a Duterte-like tyrant, creating a grotesque Janus-like monstrosity that doesn't feel too far-off from reality. Stranger things have happened since that film unleashed that beast. There’s always clear, unmistakable theses to Lav’s films, no matter how repelling their lengths can run — or in Magellan’s case, how “accessible” its close-to-three-hour runtime sounds. 

(Lav has apparently made a 9-hour cut of this film, centered on Magellan’s wife, Beatriz Barbosa. I’d be the biggest liar if I said it didn’t sound daunting experiencing another full-day-shift of watching Lav’s sine, but if it’s anything as beautiful as this, I’ll have to say I’m open.)

Magellan isn't trying to show what monstrous men look like. Lav situates his subjects against painterly visuals, care of Spanish director of photography, Artur Tort, whose lensing here evokes a mixed sense of wryness and sullenness. Ferdinand Magellan (played ably by Gael García Bernal, no surprise there!) is dwarfed, engulfed, held captive by unforgiving elements — the damp rainforest, the roaring shores, and the crisp chill of riverbanks, all places that witnessed history as it transpired, not as duplicitous men hoped to interpret them.

Like Marcos centuries after dying at the hands of Cebuanos (the film adds another ha-ha layer by mythologizing Lapu-Lapu, the Mactan hero whose bolo, we were taught, whacked off Magellan's head, into its own thing of folklore), there have been countless attempts to glorify Magellan’s feeble attempt to displace pre-colonial Filipinos not just out of their land but also of their animist beliefs. He has been regarded as a great explorer, and among the first circumnavigators of the world. Magellan denounces this outright and gives the “hero shot” to the correct person — the kind of punk-rock thing only legends like Lav Diaz can do.

Magellan

dir. Lav Diaz | 2025 | Drama, History | 4.5

In the 16th century, Ferdinand Magellan, a young and ambitious Portuguese navigator, rebels against the power of the King of Portugal, who doesn’t support his dream of discovering the world, and persuades the Spanish monarchy to fund his bold expedition to the fabled lands of the East.

🟠🟢🔵 Rate on Letterboxd