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.
Diaz’s lack of compromise is the point, and it is also the barrier. At around 163 minutes, Magellan asks you to surrender to its pace and to the way it privileges mood and moral rot over tidy context. When Diaz does allow bursts of confrontation, they land harder because the film has trained you to live inside the dread. The final movement, once Western religion is pushed onto the locals as if it is an inevitability, builds to a grim sense of consequence that feels earned (and maybe even satisfying), even if the road there can feel deliberately, stubbornly punishing.
READ MORE MOVIE REVIEWS: The Rip, People We Meet on Vacation, The Plague
I admired Magellan more than I loved it. The craft is undeniable, and Diaz’s anti-imperialist stare is unflinching, but the movie can feel so committed to spiritual fixation that it occasionally flattens the broader story into a single, repetitive thesis. Still, if you can meet it on its own terms, ideally in a theater where the stillness can actually take hold, there is a lot to chew on. Good, often powerful, and just a little too austere to fully click into greatness for me. But Diaz’s uncompromising and unflinching attack on the ego of the conqueror is the takedown I needed right now while living in a country whose President is hellbent on making all infrastructure bend to his whim.
Score: 6/10
Magellan (2026)
- Cast: Gael García Bernal, Ângela Ramos, Ronnie Lazaro, Amado Arjay Babon
- Director: Lav Diaz
- Genre: Adventure, Drama, History
- Runtime: 164 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: January 9, 2026
- Movies Like Magellan: The Last Duel, Firebrand, Emancipation
- Follow us on Letterboxd
