Review: Magellan

Early in Lav Diaz's Magellan, Portuguese conquidator Dom Albuquerque sits in the ruins of a Malaysian village he has just wiped out. He proceeds to pronounce his intention to raze Mecca and Medina, wiping out Islam, and making Christianity the dominant religion of the world again. From there he will pave the way for the Second Coming of Christ. He then passes out, presumably never living out his apocalyptic death cult fantasy.

Magellan, the brainchild of a man renowned for his antipathy to imperialism and nationalism, takes a knife to several national myths. It pillories Europe's great murderers, the conquistadors, as fucking losers who pass out after making a genocidal speech. It depicts Lapulapu, the legendary Filipino hero who defeated Magellan, as a myth. Magellan's circumnavigation is not presented as a feat of great heroism but as a genocidal and failed conquest. It certainly appealed to me as a fan of politically ambiguous and granularly detailed period pieces. A difficult and acidic yet somewhat funny take on European and Filipino history.