Whose version of history gets remembered? Perspective in historical storytelling has always been a tug of war, with myths serving as both cultural anchors and political weapons. Lav Diaz’s latest film, Magellan, opens with this tension.
Its title may belong to a man whose place in history shifts depending on who’s narrating — conqueror, pioneer, villain, or footnote — but Diaz isn’t interested in settling debates. Instead, he dismantles the very act of mythmaking, exposing how narratives are constructed, co-opted, and bent to fit power’s design. The result is the best Philippine film of the year so far: a hypnotic, uncompromising vision with a shorter runtime and more approachable than Diaz’s eight-hour epics, yet no less resonant.
At under three hours and shot in colour, a rarity in the director’s body of work, Magellan begins with Indigenous people of an unspecified land startled by the arrival of a white man. They read this as divine prophecy: “the promise of the Gods of the ancestors is upon us.”
Soon, the film plants us in 1511 Molucca, tracing the exploits of Afonso de Albuquerque’s expedition and its young captain, Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal in one of the most subdued and commanding turns of his career). We watch him return to Portugal triumphant but diseased, limping from gangrene, tended to by Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), a nun with medical training whom Ferdinand eventually marries.
From there, Diaz charts the rest of the arc we think we know: Ferdinand, rejected by King Manuel, defects to Spain and embarks on his world-defining voyage, eventually meeting his end on the shores of Cebu at the hands not of Lapu-Lapu, as schoolbook legend insists, but of Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), who manipulates both the Spaniards and his own people to maintain power.
That reframing is crucial. Diaz borrows from history but wields it as provocation. By suggesting that Lapu-Lapu may have been more myth than fact — a scarecrow raised by Humabon to ward off Christian missionizing and encroachment — Diaz isn’t erasing Filipino resistance, but interrogating how nations enshrine certain figures as symbols. Statues, holidays, and textbooks transform flesh-and-blood actors into monuments, but whose agenda does that serve? In challenging the Lapu-Lapu myth, Diaz will almost certainly court controversy, but he does this to demonstrate the slipperiness of historical truth. It’s a gesture that feels unmistakably political, the same kind of middle finger Diaz has long raised toward governments (Duterte’s, Marcos Jr.’s, and beyond) that exploit myth and memory for control.
More importantly, in dismantling Lapu-Lapu’s legend, Diaz also de-mythifies Ferdinand Magellan. This is not the swashbuckling explorer of Euro-centric lore, striding across maps as if destiny were his to claim. Bernal’s Magellan appears frail, in constant pain, often overmatched by mutiny, disease, and the chaos of the seas. His ambition is real, but so too are his limitations. Diaz doesn’t glorify or vilify Magellan. The film renders the Portuguese explorer with a level head as a man limping through history, undone less by heroic resistance than by his own frailty and by the very alliances he believes secured his power. That balance — refusing to sanctify or demonize — makes Diaz’s portrait both bracing and humane.
Diaz also deconstructs the very notion of colonial heroism, stripping it down to its brutal foundation. Magellan’s legacy, so often framed as discovery and progress, is revealed here as one defined by bloodshed. Time and again, the camera lingers in long, unbroken takes on bodies left in the conquest’s wake: colonizers sprawled lifeless on the shore, those native to the land slaughtered in their homes with equal indifference. The repetition of these tableaux resists spectacle; instead, it becomes ritual — a meditation on how history is written in corpses. By refusing to look away, Diaz reminds us that behind every monument and every “courageous voyage” exist graves dug too quickly to be marked.
The performances anchor the film’s epic scale with raw humanity. García Bernal is inspired casting as Magellan, bringing quiet restraint to a figure so often mythologized, embodying both ambition and frailty in equal measure. As Humabon, Ronnie Lazaro delivers a counterpoint, a ruler shown not as pure villain or ally, but as a man navigating power with sharp calculation, his presence both magnetic and unsettling.
Angela Azevedo, as Beatriz, shines in quieter interludes. Scenes where she appears during Magellan’s delirious bouts of seasickness or homesickness give the film rare moments of warmth. Diaz originally conceived Magellan as a nine-hour epic centered on Beatriz, a project whittled down to the present cut. One can only hope that version surfaces someday, if only to see Azevedo command the screen again.
But the heart of the film belongs to Amado Arjay Babon as Enrique. Seldom more than a footnote in the chronicles (and often omitted entirely from Philippine textbooks), Enrique emerges here as the most complex figure of all. Babon, though much older than the real-life counterpart, imbues him with lived-in dignity, his loyalty to Magellan fascinating in its ambivalence: is it gratitude, coercion, or survival instinct? His presence unsettles easy readings of conquest, loyalty, and identity. The final shot of the film — Enrique delivering a monologue that swells into one of Diaz’s most arresting closing images — secures Babon’s performance as not just a highlight, but a revelation.
Visually, Magellan is breathtaking. Co-shot with Artur Tort (regular collaborator of Albert Serra), the cinematography shifts textures to reflect geography and mood. Portugal and Spain become almost antiseptic — clean but lifeless — contrasted with the storm-swept unpredictability of Molucca and Cebu. The 1.33:1 aspect ratio tightens the frame until it feels almost Bergmanesque with faces boxed in and history pressing down. Widows in black lined along the Portuguese shore waiting for news of their husbands forms one of the film’s most indelible images, as Magellan solemnly assures them their men “died courageously.” The composition lingers like gangrene itself — hard to look at, even harder to walk away with.
As with most Diaz films, pacing will test even the most experienced theatre goer’s patience. The first two hours unfold as a character study of a man drunk on ambition but almost unequipped to bear it, drifting through mutinies and betrayals in long takes that stretch and breathe. Only in the final hour does the tempo quicken, leading to the Cebu massacre staged with harrowing inevitability. For some, this languor will definitely frustrate. For Diaz admirers, however, this is a familiar rhythm, a trance that makes the third act’s rupture even more potent.
Language choices add another layer. Bernal largely speaks Spanish, his native tongue, though his Portuguese lines suggest he certainly had the ability to carry more of the film in Magellan’s mother tongue. More contentious is the use of Cebuano here, which occasionally veers into modern registers that jar against the historical setting. As a fluent speaker, I found this dissonance distracting, though ultimately minor in a film this dense and daring.
What matters most is how Magellan resists exoticizing Indigenous life. Unlike colonialist epics that flatten the colonized into a backdrop, Diaz insists on their complexity. We see belief systems, rituals, social bonds, and justice mechanisms that predate the Spaniards — worlds with meaning long before foreign crosses were planted in the soil. Colonization here is not the gift of civilization but its unmaking. That clarity of vision makes Magellan less a history lesson than a confrontation, daring us to recognize what was lost and how myths obscure it.
Diaz has long been the country’s great cinematic chronicler of trauma and memory, but Magellan feels different: tighter, sharper, and more combustible. It’s a hypnotic, almost spiritual experience, one that doesn’t offer easy heroes or villains but invites us to wrestle with the stories we’re familiar with.
In exposing the fragility of both Magellan and Lapu-Lapu as symbols, Diaz points us back to the real engine of history: human ambition, compromise, betrayal, and survival. That is where power lies — and where cinema, in Diaz’s hands, becomes its most urgent.
