Review of Magellan (2026)
There are going to be a lot of people who tune into Magellan expecting a rigorous historical march through Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition, the Portuguese explorer whose voyage pushed into the Philippines and quickly blurred discovery with conquest, conversion, and violence. Lav Diaz is not really interested in giving you a clean, classroom-friendly accounting. He is more interested in the mentality of the conqueror, and in the way religion becomes both compass and excuse when power wants to call itself divine.
Gael García Bernal is a canny piece of casting as Ferdinand Magellan, because Diaz uses his star presence to keep you locked on a man who grows harder to defend the longer you sit with him. This Magellan is deeply pious and deeply vain, and Diaz films those traits like a sickness that spreads through the ship. The movie lingers on his judgment, his paranoia, his willingness to punish, and the thin line between maintaining order and feeding an ego that needs obedience. By the time the expedition reaches land, Magellan has already made you feel the exhaustion, the hunger, and the spiritual delusion that turns survival into doctrine.
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