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In 2019, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines’ National Quincentennial Committee declared that “Lapulapu” without the hyphen is the correct spelling of the name of the man celebrated as the first Filipino hero. For those of us raised to hyphenate the name, the change might have seemed minor, a detail in the tide of historical debates.
In Lav Diaz’s “Magellan,” the Philippines’ entry to the 98th Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film, the subtitles keep the hyphenated version of the name. Yet what the film changes is far more radical and controversial than orthography. It tears down the myths we cling to and reveals a history in which Magellan’s death comes not from a legendary figure, but from the stark, chaotic forces of those he sought to subjugate.
At first glance, “Magellan” seems to signal a concession. It is in color rather than Diaz’s usual black and white. It runs under three hours, practically brisk for his fans. And it stars Gael García Bernal, a familiar face whose presence might suggest a turn toward accessibility. But none of this proves true. The film borrows the trappings of a conventional biopic only to subvert them, leaving a work that refuses comfort or myth.
The story follows Magellan in the final chapters of his life, sailing under the Spanish crown during campaigns in Southeast Asia in the early sixteenth century. Diaz narrows his focus to this fatal stretch, culminating in the expedition’s collapse in the Philippines. Religion and conquest bleed into one another, faith wielded as both justification and weapon. By reframing history away from a European gaze, Diaz shifts the emphasis to the human and societal toll of colonization, the losses that no statue can capture.
The cinematography reflects this restraint. Muted colors, quiet seas, and a square aspect ratio that keeps the audience anchored in observation rather than spectacle. The world feels lived-in, authentic, and unvarnished, avoiding the gloss of typical historical epics.
Diaz’s character study of the eponymous figure is relentless. Bernal’s Magellan is a man drained of charisma. He carries himself with a stiff gravity, his eyes suggesting obsession more than vision. We never see him as a daring adventurer, nor even as a compelling villain. He becomes instead a vessel of zeal, someone unable to tell mutiny from dissent or faith from mania. His voyage does not unfold in the manner of a grand narrative. Time leaps ahead in jolting cuts, whole years collapsing into fragments. Battles do not rage before us. Instead, we see what they leave behind.
Perhaps most familiar to us is the Mactan sequence, the moment every schoolbook version of Magellan’s life ends with the celebrated clash against Lapulapu. Diaz presents it in an unexpected way, refusing the expected climax. The battle rages, but the hero as we know him is gone.
What we see instead are the remains of conflict, the sand scattered with the dead. The bodies are motionless, their stillness more unsettling than any choreography of combat. The choice is deliberate. By denying the audience the catharsis of a counter-hero, the film asks what it means for a nation to cling to hero worship, even in the form of defiance, and whether this risks reducing the vast reality of colonial violence into a single redemptive gesture.
The answer, for Diaz, seems to be that heroes, whether colonizer or resister, risk becoming idols that cover over the true costs of history. By removing both Magellan the “discoverer” and Lapulapu the “redeemer” from their pedestals, he forces us to see the machinery of conquest itself. The forced conversions. The hollow proclamations. The anonymous dead who do not have statues raised in their name. This refusal of hero worship is the film’s most radical act.
The moral gravity falls instead on figures at the margins. Enrique, the enslaved interpreter, embodies the fracture of identity under colonial rule. He is renamed, reshaped, and yet never fully silenced. Beatriz, Magellan’s wife, appears in fleeting visions, a haunting presence as intangible as Lapulapu in the film, emphasizing loss rather than triumph. Neither is a savior, yet through them the violence of conquest becomes tangible in ways Magellan never could.
Again and again, Diaz turns away from the chaos of conflict to show what comes after, arranging survivors and landscapes into images that feel mournful and deliberate. These tableaux are striking not for grandeur but for their stillness, as if history itself had been frozen mid-breath. There is no music, no grand orchestral gesture to ennoble what unfolds. Only the creak of timber, the sigh of wind, the lap of waves, and the groan of men at sea. The result is not spectacle but mourning.
“Magellan” never gives us the comfort of heroes. It shows us conquest as fragments and aftermath, a journey emptied of triumph. What stayed with me was not Magellan himself but the silence around him, the sense that history is carried forward less by monuments than by losses that cannot be undone. In this, Diaz makes us wonder if it’s revisionism or a reckoning with the human cost of the heroes we put on pedestals. He turns that silence into cinema, and the result is as uncompromising as it is unforgettable.