Running 160 minutes, Magellan could be considered a short film for Filipino writer/director Lav Diaz. Often also serving as his own cinematographer and editor, it is not abnormal for one of his films to eclipse the three-hour mark. Two of his most acclaimed works are The Woman Who Left (winning the Golden Lion at the 2016 Venice Film Festival) and Season of the Devil, both clocking in at nearly four hours. A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery reaches eight hours, Melancholia and A Tale of Filipino Violence are seven, and From What Is Before is five-and-a-half.

Apart from its reduced runtime, Magellan also contrasts on account of its exponentially grander scale and scope. Almost all of the previously mentioned films were shot in black-and-white with consumer-level HD and DSLR cameras, extremely inexpensive compared to traditional productions. For this film, €2 million was allotted, still a small amount for a story taking place on multiple continents and headlined by a major international star in Gael García Bernal.

The relative brevity of this film was initially not by design; the project first announced in 2019 under the title of Beatriz, The Wife. The goal was to depict the life of Ferdinand Magellan through the eyes of his younger wife, whom he married just before his expedition, and then never saw again. True to his form, Diaz is still working on a much lengthier sort of sequel to Magellan with the extra footage, which will fulfill that promise. Here, she is essentially a cameo, a brief moment of solace between Ferdinand’s perilous journeys. That choice is in service to this specific story, as Magellan sees the titular explorer as little more than power-hungry and only out for himself.

Magellan left Spain in 1519, seeking to reach the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia. He sailed west, intending to prove that there was a faster route than going under the southern tip of Africa. For two years, he and his crew sailed across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, eventually making landfall in the eastern Philippines. They were the first European contact for the native people, bringing the word of God with them. Of course, this view of Christianity is still strictly conservative, with two homosexual crewmen being executed midway through the journey. All physical renderings of local idols are immediately burned, with any displays of worship being swiftly punished. As Bender once said in Futurama: “The whole world must learn of our peaceful ways... by force!”

For many Filipinos, the legend of Ferdinand Magellan is one marked by bloodlust and outsized ambition, a symptom of the European disease to conquer rather than cooperate. Working with cinematographer Artur Tort, a frequent collaborator of the similarly patient director Albert Serra, Diaz constructs breathtakingly painterly frames. Within the 4:3 ratio, both the background and foreground contain a multitude of plot strands, their naked truth revealing the spoken lies. In one moment, Ferdinand kneels to pray to God in gratitude, with several native corpses lying near him.

Although he often bristles against the idea of ‘Slow Cinema,’ Diaz is very much a part of that community, along with other revered filmmakers like Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Bela Tarr, and Theo Angelopoulos. The camera sits motionless for minutes on end, equally capturing both the epic and mundane. It replicates the pace of a journey, the ecstasy not all that much different than the endless agony. You’re lulled into the film’s liminal flow of time, a witness to the tragically pathetic expansion of Western civilization. Others may be lulled to sleep, their slumber never interrupted due to the film’s absence of any noise above a whisper.

Even with its length, much of Magellan still feels surface-level. Granted, this is not meant to be the definitive portrait of the man, as evidenced by the fact that we don’t get a good look at him until at least an hour in. Diaz is more concerned with repercussions than reinterpretations, the slippery slope this specific part of the world has been on for more than five centuries. Many of the lessons are still being learned the hard way, with the only difference being the way they’re dressed.