Lav Diaz poses questions aimed at dismantling the foundational myth of modern colonialism. His intent is not to revise or redeem the figure of Fernão de Magalhães, but to dismantle him, to strip away all glory, all heroism. In a way, Diaz understands that the best weapon against evil is not to sanctify it, but to profane it. In order not to become trapped by its allure, it must be confronted in its emptiness, in its lack of substance. It is necessary to profane its figures, to break their symbolic aura and strip them of their power.

Lav chooses to narrate from the margins, from the bodies devastated by violence, from the dislocated time of conquered peoples. The film does not build an epic but a lament: a radical reflection on the moral foundations of the colonial project and the narratives that, centuries later, still persist. Far from any heroic biography or imperialist glory, Magalhães appears in the film as an empty specter, portrayed with disturbing neutrality by Gael García Bernal. A walking body, an instrument of a mission that contradicts the very values it claims to defend. The faith he preaches is devoid of spirituality; it has become a weapon of domination. Beside him, Enrique (slave, translator, and witness) is the one who truly carries the film’s gaze: the only one with agency, the only one who remembers and can imagine another story. The focus is on the final stage of the expedition to the Moluccas, when Magalhães, now in the service of the Spanish Crown, meets his death in the Philippines. But Lav Diaz avoids any spectacle surrounding that death. His narrative is built through ellipses, static shots, and a fractured temporality that denies the continuity of the official narrative. The gaps left by the editing are not mere absences, but spaces filled with death: vanished villages, nameless bodies dragged by the sea. Violence is felt, above all, in what remains invisible. In this way, Magalhaes becomes a visual prayer, an elegy for the defeated. The opening scene, where islanders greet the white man with songs, gives way to a brutal shot: the sea returning their corpses. This transition encapsulates the film’s political gesture.

There is no possible redemption, no turning back. There is no room for glory. Instead, there is a bleak gaze upon the relationship between faith and violence, between evangelization and extermination. The slow, contemplative editing forces us to feel the pain of a history we do not know—not just to observe it. And within this aesthetic choice lies a profound ethics: it is not about representation, but about accountability. The contemporary dimension appears subtly, but powerfully.

The mention of Lapulapu, who defeated Magalhães and is today exalted by the regimes of Duterte and Marcos, underscores how history continues to be a battlefield and a tool of ideological manipulation. In our current times of false liberalism, one might point to the Argentine government’s celebration of Carlos Menem’s presidency or the extermination campaigns of Juan Manuel de Rosas as parallel examples. Diaz does not denounce the past to condemn it, but to warn us of its persistence in the present. He is not merely questioning the figure of a conqueror, but the logic that still structures systems of power and authority: who writes and rewrites history every day, with which voices, and in service of whose interests.

With the collaboration of cinematographer Artur Tort, Diaz crafts images that evoke Renaissance and Baroque painting, but also the cinema of Pedro Costa and Manoel de Oliveira. The lighting is dense, the sound spaced and ghostly. Everything in the mise-en-scène is designed to fracture the linearity of historical narrative. But the heart of the film is discursive. Diaz does not film to confirm myths or to illustrate schoolbooks. He films to open wounds, to ask what it means to film the past from a colonized country. And in that decision, Magalhaes becomes a cinema of counter-narrative: the conqueror vanishes, the witnesses remain. History is not told by the victors, but by those who survived to remember it. In its final minutes, when the film reconstructs the Battle of Mactan, the staging avoids all heroism. There is no hand-to-hand combat, no final glory. Three ships exchange fire from a distance, as if they were toy boats. History disintegrates before our eyes.

Though it is known to be part of a larger project—a possible second film focused on Beatriz, Magalhães’s wife—Magalhaes possesses complete conceptual force and does not need to conclude anything. It prefers to leave doors open to new questions, new memories. Because what Diaz challenges is not just a historical figure, but the legitimacy of the discourses that uphold him. And for that reason, in its slowness, its austerity, and its radical aesthetics, Magalhaes does not depict violence—it reveals its resonances. It does not commemorate the conquerors—it listens to the vanquished, opening a door that allows us to find new ways of seeing and representing the past.