Cannes 2025: Magellan movie review – Gael García Bernal plays explorer in engrossing epic
4.5/5 stars
The Cannes Film Festival may be hosting yet another virtual-reality programme this year, but the most immersive event on the Croisette in the French seaside city so far has been the premiere of an old-school, two-dimensional, three-hour movie filmed in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio.
Revolving around its titular Portuguese explorer's expeditions to Southeast Asia in the early 16th century, Magellan is relentlessly engrossing – an epic in which viewers witness the distress, death and destruction brought about by one man's delusions of colonial conquest.
By presenting Ferdinand Magellan as a dogmatic, slave-owning colonialist who brooks no dissent from his quixotic mission, Filipino auteur
Lav Diaz and his Mexican lead actor Gael García Bernal have delivered a subversive portrait of a complicated figure who has long been mythologised as a benign bringer of enlightenment.
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Interestingly, Magellan also sets out to undermine the narrative about the explorer's misdeeds in Diaz's home country as well.
Rather than sticking to the orthodox view of Magellan's death in the Philippines as a glorious victory against colonialism, Diaz depicts indigenous chieftains as scheming manipulators who use this pigheaded white man as a pawn for their own politicking.
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