Despite our best efforts to go into a film completely blind, sometimes we’ll catch online chatter or a snippet of a promotional interview that inevitably colors something about our first viewing of an anticipated movie. It could be gossip about stars not getting along that might affect your perception of their onscreen rapport, or the knowledge that a director was replaced by someone else partway into production due to creative differences.
In the arthouse world, a perhaps surprising example of game-changing pre-release context has emerged with Filipino independent filmmaker Lav Diaz and his latest movie, “Magellan“. But befitting the man behind several of the longest narrative films on record (e.g. “Evolution of a Filipino Family”), the bombshell in question is that “Magellan” — one of his shortest features of late at 160-ish minutes — was apparently intended to be nine hours in length. And that a nine-hour version may still be on the way, according to Diaz as recently as a month before “Magellan’s” world premiere at Cannes.
Should the nine-hour version eventually emerge for public consumption, it’s currently unclear whether it would be released as an “extended cut” of “Magellan” or branded as a new film with a new title. But the intriguing thing is that when this project was first announced in 2019, it did have a different working title, “Beatriz, The Wife”, with a synopsis suggesting that this title character would be a far greater focus for the story than she ultimately is in the two-and-a-half-hour version of “Magellan”.
Portrayed by Ângela Azevedo, Beatriz does still have a key role to play in Diaz’s film, which is named after her husband, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, played by Gael García Bernal (in one of his finest performances), whose star presence may be a factor in why a shorter, more digestible cut has debuted first as a possibly easier sell for international distributors. But a crucial thing about “Magellan” is that while Bernal has by far the most screen time of any performer and the title named after his character, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that the film is wholly about Ferdinand Magellan in the end, even if it does function as an atypical biopic of him.
A little breakdown of biographical information relevant to the film, if you’re behind on your reading about the early 16th century: Ferdinand Magellan was an ambitious navigator who’d been part of various expeditions on behalf of Portugal in India, Africa, the Malay Peninsula and more. After a disagreement with the Portuguese king, he persuaded the Spanish Crown to fund an expedition to fabled lands in the East, avoiding established Portuguese routes around southern Africa in order to help Spain get a foothold in the valuable spice trade from the Moluccas.
Along the way, the exhausting voyage involved various mutinies and crew deaths, and upon reaching the islands of the Malayan Archipelago, Magellan’s mind and ambitions changed. Conquest and conversion of the local population was his new goal.After brief opening credits listing only Diaz and Bernal, the film starts with a woman checking what seems to be stones in a stream, the camera capturing her from a far distance; apart from what looks like cuff bracelets on her arms and legs, she is entirely naked. Suddenly seeing something off-camera, this woman leaves her spot in the stream and runs away to update her tribe. “I saw a white man!” she says, causing a stir. “The promise of the gods of our ancestors is here!”
Excitement about the sighting prompts the local women to chant, “The God of Water has spoken! Praise be unto Him!” After this has gone on for a bit, the title card for “Magellan” abruptly drops with an air of foreboding. And with good cause. We’ll check back with these particular people, their faith and how that will be challenged later, but Diaz’s mission statement here — at least with this cut of the project — is to deconstruct the myth-making surrounding the Portuguese explorer, achieving a more historically accurate portrayal of Magellan’s attempts to colonize the Philippines, plus his earlier participation in the conquering of Malacca and other regions.
Diaz centers Magellan in the story as required, but always frames Portugal and Spain’s “glories” as abhorrent. It plays in stark contrast to Amazon Prime Video’s recent Spanish miniseries “Boundless,” which was created on the 500th anniversary of the First Circumnavigation of the World (or the “Magellan expedition”), stars Rodrigo Santoro as Magellan and is directed by Simon West of “Con Air” fame. (Diaz could make “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” or “The Expendables 2,” but West couldn’t make “Norte, the End of History.”)
In exploring violence across his seventeen-year narrative (be it the colonizers toward the colonized or the former fighting within their own ranks), Diaz notably avoids showing almost every instance of the acts actually being committed. The closest we get to an onscreen murder is a weapon being swung for the beheading of a mutinous shipmate during Magellan’s voyage, only for the film to cut away to something else before the neck is sliced.
Rather, what Diaz does through his characteristically long, unbroken takes is really make you linger in the horror of slaughter. Not so much in getting you up close with gory flesh wounds or dismembered body parts (excluding a notable exception late in the runtime), but in the constant presence of dead bodies within the frame. Many a long, uninterrupted speech or conversation between soldiers takes place in village or forest spaces littered with corpses, the body language of Magellan and his countrymen stepping around the slain being more akin to someone avoiding treading on dog shit than treating human lives lost with a modicum of respect. The avoidance of widescreen framing, making a lot of the compositions particularly tight, only helps to enhance that unease.
In its exploration of the first Filipino “encounter” with the West and the events leading up to it, Diaz’s confrontational film proves one of his most fascinating achievements: a hypnotizing historical and spiritual epic that’s immersive in a way that few decades-spanning stories successfully pull off. With that in mind, it’s intriguing to imagine quite what the proposed nine-hour expansion could be like. The “Release the Beatriz Cut” campaign starts here.
Grade: B
“Magellan” had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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