Magellan

Criterion

A hypnotic journey engraved in images of staggering beauty and horror, this monumental achievement from Lav Diaz boldly rewrites the imperialist mythmaking of the Age of Discovery. Elegantly minimalist yet overpowering in its scale and impact, Magellan follows the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) as he embarks on his epochal quest to cross the Pacific—a voyage that spirals into zealotry and violence when he attempts to impose Christianity upon the people of the Philippines. Abetted by García Bernal’s radically antiheroic portrayal, Diaz composes a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.

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