Magellan (Magalhães)

 

Director Lav Diaz

director on the set

director with Sanny Joaquin and cinematographer Artur Tort

Diaz with assistant director Sanny Joaquin

Diaz with cast at Cannes

Gael García Bernal and Lav Diaz

Ferdinand Magellan at Naval Museum in Madrid

MAGELLAN (Magalhães)                 B                                                                         Philippines  Spain  Portugal  France  Taiwan  (163 mi)  2025  d: Lav Diaz

The promise of the Gods of the ancestors is upon us.                                                                   —Indigenous natives first reaction to seeing a white man

Lav Diaz is a pioneering Filipino auteur who re-examines history through his films which challenge conventional narratives, known for his long films and contemplative style, making films of moral complexity, often delving into the themes of history, suffering, and the human condition, whose earlier four-hour film Norte: The End of History (Norte, hangganan ng kasaysayan) (2014) was an intimate character study loosely based upon Raskolnikov from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, while also covertly paralleling the political influence of former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.  Writing and directing his own films, also sharing the cinematography and editing duties, while responsible for his own production design, most of his films are over five-hours in length, some of them pushing the nine and ten-hour mark, where six of his films are in the top 20 of the longest films of all time (List of longest films), offering an extensive exploration of the Filipino socio-political landscape through cinema, with Diaz indicating he is planning a nine-hour extended version of this film focusing more on the wife from about fifteen hours of footage shot but not used, releasing this more accessible shorter version under three hours for film festivals.  By retelling the tale of 16th century Age of Discovery explorer Ferdinand Magellan from a minimalist and modernist perspective, where he’s no swashbuckling hero of the seas, instead Diaz portrays him as radically antiheroic, depicting his voyage as a brutal, revisionist critique of colonialism, mythmaking, and religious zealotry driven by obsession, rejecting the typical “Great Man of History” narrative, conveying a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.  A meditation on the excesses of ambition and avarice, where we are forced to witness what colonialism looks like, with splashes of Native nudity, it’s a bit like John Huston’s THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), with men developing a God-complex, versed in their own moral superiority, viewing themselves above the teeming throngs, continually downplaying the needs and interests of the Indigenous tribes who are simply not like them, and therefore don’t matter as much.  It’s a somber case study of colonialist expansion, where the rest of the world is seen only by how it can benefit the country of origin that financed the expedition, in this case Spain, as Portugal, the country of Magellan’s birth, turned down his original request, as Portugal already had a highly profitable eastern seaward trade route to the Spice Islands via Africa, making a costly, highly speculative new western route unnecessary.  

Working in color for the first time in a decade, making his first film not in the Tagalog language, primarily using Spanish and Portuguese, with the director sharing cinematography and editing duties with Artur Tort, the regular cameraman for Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra, who is a producer on this film, screening in the Cannes Premiere section, yet in some ways it resembles Lisandro Alonso’s period film Jauja (2014) or Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) in its historical reach, while also treading on the same expansive territory as Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005).  The difference is there’s absolutely no interiority of Magellan, or anyone else for that matter, though this is more restrained and nuanced from his other films, as Magellan’s quest turns into an obsession with power, leading to men questioning his leadership, where there’s a lot of inflicted cruelty both towards his own men, some of whom openly mutiny and are left behind in some God forsaken place in Argentina’s Patagonia, yet also towards the natives he meets in this “new world” of the Philippines.  Despite his meticulous planning, Magellan is unprepared for the difficulties he encounters attempting to pass the Strait of Magellan in the southernmost tip of South America, taking over a month, much longer than expected, with one mutinied ship returning to Spain, while another was lost at sea on an exploring expedition, yet even afterwards, setting sail into the open expanse of the Pacific Ocean, he is shocked that it takes months, not days, without encountering food, leaving many men dying of malnourishment or sick with scurvy en route, where his fleet of five ships is whittled down to just a single ship.  Like most Europeans at the time, however, Magellan thought Asia was much closer to South America than it actually is.  Far from the courageous explorer depicted in the history books, according to Diaz, who spoke at the Cannes screening, “Magellan is no hero—he is a man facing his own oblivion.”  There’s a lot of screaming to the high heavens, and praying to the spirits for divine intervene, yet also an autocratic ruthlessness rarely seen in depictions of epic explorations, where brutal punishment and death go hand in hand with hunger and starvation.  Yet most of all, it’s a depiction of supreme arrogance that leads to a massive sea of deaths, which mirrors the rampant corruption and presumptive superiority of the current Trump administration, but also authoritarian Filipino leaders Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte (currently on trial for war crimes), belittling others and downplaying the influence of anyone who does not comply with their directives or disagrees with their actions of enriching themselves, reviving the imperialist spirit of colonialism in the modern era.

The story is told in three sections, with the dates imprinted on the lower left side of the screen, the first is set in Malacca, Malaysia in 1511, commonly known as the Spice Islands, where Magellan (Mexican actor Gael García Bernal, the first international star Diaz has ever worked with), under someone else’s command, Afonso de Albuquerque (Argentinean film critic and programmer Roger Alan Koza), participates in the capture of Malacca, leaving him wounded and injured in the leg, eventually limping from the onset of gangrene, yet they are victorious, with bloodied bodies seen strewn across the landscape, acquiring a Malay slave named Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), who is initially seen caged but becomes his own personal interpreter.  Little more than a footnote in history, Enrique is often omitted entirely, but in some ways he is the true protagonist of the film, patiently getting his revenge in obtaining his freedom, a near silent observer who has the last and final words of the film.  The second follows his recovery in Portugal where he has a controversial falling out with King Manuel I of Portugal, who rejected his plans for exploration and grew furious when he aligned himself with King Charles V of Spain, taking an oath of allegiance, which was paramount to treason in Portugal, as the two countries were arch rivals who were not only competing for dominance in the spice industry, but also for influence in colonies around the world.  It’s here that he takes a wife, Beatriz (Ângela Azevedo), who grows pregnant before his departure in 1519, and is seen as an angelic counterpart to his ruthless ambition, Magellan new clip official from Cannes Film Festival 2025 (1/3) YouTube (1:45), surrealistically appearing in his dreams during the long voyage.  The proposed longer version supposedly revolves around Beatriz, where virtually nothing is known about her.  Once he sets sail, his 265 men all-Portuguese crew is mostly comprised of criminals, because many experienced sailors refused to support Magellan, unraveling in a long, slow section where time appears to stop, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (50 seconds), losing all that initial eager anticipation of what they may encounter, where the prolonged voyage severely weakens the crew, becoming a test of hunger and allegiance, exposing questions of loyalty, where Magellan’s behavior is markedly different than when they began, as he started treating his officers in a cruel way, growing very angry and indignant that some of them mutinied, forcing one to behead the other, subjecting men to lashes while executing crew members who engaged in homosexuality, according to a journal kept by Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian navigator whom Magellan hired to keep detailed documents of the voyage.  Diaz apparently spent seven years researching Magellan, aided by Filipino historian Ambeth Ocampo, using a replicated reconstruction of the actual ship Victoria, historically accurate costumes, with no battle scenes, only the devastating aftermath is shown, and no actual violence other than what he forces his own sailors to endure on the ship, ultimately shifting the focus from the European perspective to that of the Indigenous tribes, becoming a revisionist work that goes against the grain of conventional historical accounts, much of which is little more than victorious mythmaking.

The third section shows Magellan arriving in the Philippines in 1521, a loose collection of kingdoms living in uneasy truce, comprised of more than 7000 islands, though fewer than 2000 are inhabited, 'Magellan' Lav DIAZ Official Clip starring Gael Garcia Bernal ... YouTube (1:32), which they thought to be the Spice Islands, but they didn’t find any spices, discovering instead a developed society, one not at all isolated from the outside world, possessing a written language, and already having some knowledge of Europeans through traders.  They are met by local leader Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro), with Magellan offering sweet jam to his sick son, who may have been suffering from scurvy, while also presenting him with a statuette of Santo Niño to watch over him.  When the boy recovers, many attribute his miraculous recovery to God, quickly converting the island to Catholicism and baptizing the inhabitants, but in their zealous rush for complete domination, they destroy all remnants of the local anitos, viewing them as sacrilegious idolatry figures, an act that emboldens resistance, as their island way of life is being destroyed.  With obsessive delusions of grandeur and undisputed power, most of the tribes capitulate, but there are holdouts, with Humabon leading Magellan into the wrath of one of his foes, another chief named Lapu-Lapu who refuses to convert, instead mobilizing his forces against the foreign leader, with Magellan profoundly underestimating the strength of the natives, believing superior European weaponry would scare off the “barbarian” forces, but due to shallow waters, his ships remained at too great a distance to inflict harm, so he takes a small landing party of only about 60 half-armed men, burning the grass homes, which only helps mobilize the resistance, where the overwhelming counterattack by 2000 natives wipes out the European forces in what amounts to a massacre, killing Magellan on the spot, like Custer’s last stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn, leaving no survivors, turning tragically dark and morbid, a fate surprisingly narrated by Enrique, conveyed through an ultra-realistic approach to colonial violence.  The dead bodies on the beach paint a dire picture of human slaughter, with the remaining 18 men on the ship, one of whom is Enrique, quickly making a hasty exit and returning to Spain, becoming the only ship to completely circumnavigate the globe.  In the Philippines, Lapu-Lapu is a celebrated national hero for having withstood the initial European invasion, remaining a mythic cultural figure that remains embedded in the national consciousness, even warranting a national holiday, but Diaz subverts this image with provocative suggestions that Humabon, in an attempt to overcome his rival, may have invented Lapu-Lapu, who is never seen, and may not have ever existed in human form, cleverly planted in the mind’s eye as a myth to deceive Magellan and his men, which then leads to their downfall in an ambush, using the power of mythmaking as a political weapon.  Questioning whose version of history gets remembered, Diaz suggests history is not always used for truth, but for manipulation.   

They Were Expendable

 

Director John Ford (center) on the set

Ford with actress Donna Reed

John Wayne and Donna Reed

The principal players

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THEY WERE EXPENDABLE                     B                                                                             USA  (135 mi)  1945  d:  John Ford

You and I are professionals.  If the manager says sacrifice, we lay down the bunt and let somebody else hit the home run.  That’s what we were trained for and that’s what we’ll do.                  —Admiral Blackwell (Charles Trowbridge)

The title itself may be the most devastating aspect of the picture, adding a unique sense of gravitas, shot 8 months after D-Day in WWII and released to audiences only after victory was at hand on the 4th anniversary of Pearl Harbor Day, yet depicting an earlier period during the war when American forces were constantly losing ground in the Pacific.  While it is jingoistic to the core, especially in its repeated use of conventional military music, it lacks the propagandistic allure of wartime films, typically caught up in the euphoria of victory, carrying moralistic platitudes about how the world was saved from the forces of evil.  There is none of that here, as instead we find ourselves in the Philippines as it’s about to be overrun by Japanese forces, the site of one of America’s most resounding defeats in the Pacific.  While it’s rare to see a more restrained John Wayne on the losing side, war pictures are normally associated with winning the war, but this is a decidedly different slant, as American forces are in full retreat mode, much like the Russian depiction of WWII in Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957), where the war’s ultimate outcome is far from certain, creating a profoundly elegiac mood replete with tragic overtones.  Nonetheless, it’s a heroic account of the effectiveness of PT boats, known for their speed and quick maneuverability, yet they were an unknown quantity during the war, overshadowed by the larger vessels carrying all the guns and ammunition that could inflict major damage, as a PT boat could carry only one anti-aircraft gun and four torpedoes.  More deceptive and elusive than the larger vessels, they were used for quick assaults where they could get in and get out, but the men were more exposed to incoming fire.  Ford headed the Eleventh Naval District Motion Picture and Still Photographic Unit for the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA), headed by Colonel William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, a legendary World War I Medal of Honor winner, with Ford accountable to Donovan, who in turn reported directly to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  Enlisting more than 200 men making a series of documentary war shorts for the Department of Navy, as Ford was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, filming THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY (1942), where a reconnaissance team decoded Japanese messages and thwarted a surprise attack, while also filming the Doolittle Raid, the first to inflict damage to Tokyo, a major morale booster at the time, and even had film crews landing on Omaha Beach during the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, providing footage used in newsreels.  But this film was based on the 1942 book by William Lindsay White offering first-hand accounts from Lt. John D. Bulkeley, one of the most decorated men of the war who commanded a squadron of six PT boats in the Philippines known as Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, his second-in-command Lt. Robert Kelly, and U.S. Army Nurse Lt. Beulah Greenwalt Walcher (known as Peggy Smith in the book), with the latter two becoming romantically involved in the film, each of the three filing separate lawsuits against MGM for infringement rights and confidentiality violations, each settling out of court.  In the movie, Bulkeley becomes John “Brick” Brickley, played by actor Robert Montgomery, who actually commanded a PT boat during the war (also a destroyer at Normandy, co-directing second-unit action sequences).  John Wayne, in contrast, a man who never served his country (and Ford never let him forget it, constantly deriding and hounding him over this issue), is his constant sidekick, Lt. “Rusty” Ryan, something of a showboat action figure, a mix of bravery and impetuousness, where a bit of shrapnel sends Ryan to the hospital where he encounters Donna Reed as Lt. Sandy Davyss, an attractive yet level-headed girl showing uncommon grace under fire.  At the outset, growing tired of the inactivity, Ryan is about to enlist on a destroyer ship when Pearl Harbor is invaded, altering the course of history.    

While not a documentary, the film is fictionalized, shot with a darkened and shadowy Expressionist style by Joseph A. August, adding a romantic element while emphasizing realism, becoming one of the more intriguing WWII war films for that reason, showing very few combat sequences for a war movie, yet Ford feared making a commercial film while still in uniform.  In documentary tradition, Ford didn’t want to use wall-to-wall music to score the film, having MGM’s indistinguished house composer Herbert Stothart thrust upon him, but he ended up doing exactly that, clearly objecting to some of the “heavy music” added afterwards.  Actually shot in Key Biscayne, Florida, the palm trees swaying in the breeze add a tropical flair, setting the scene in the Philippines just prior to the fall of Bataan when American forces quickly lost their foothold.  The grim resolve is what separates this film from others, as the fighting force is ready for action, but they take severe casualties, losing both ships and men, creating a downbeat mood of grief and sorrow that is unrelenting, exemplifying the meaning of the word “sacrifice.”  In the early days of the war, there was open suspicion about the smallish stature of the PT boats, as they couldn’t be counted on to inflict major damage, which is what was really needed until planes could get back into the air, as it was the Air Force that turned the tides of the war.  Early on, however, after the epic destruction suffered by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the Americans were simply outmanned and outgunned, with the Japanese continually expanding their grip on the Pacific, where holding their ground was often catastrophic.  The romance surrounding PT boats had yet to emerge, personified by President John F. Kennedy’s heroism as a PT boat commander during the war (Sixty Years Later, the Story of PT-109 Still Captivates ...), making him a glorified war hero.  But in 1945, this film actually captured the nation’s imagination, where Ford was convinced this wasn’t just another war movie, having already achieved critical success with his WWI war epic The Lost Patrol (1934), with this bearing an eerie similarity of inexplicable loss, believing the story of John D. Bulkeley, one of the most decorated U.S. naval officers of World War II, awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, who along with his PT boat operators were part of America’s heroic tradition, like the cowboy or gunslinger of the American West, eventually commercialized in the American television comedy McHale’s Navy (1962 – 66).  The sentiment of these undervalued and underused naval veterans is that they were underappreciated by the military brass, never given a chance to prove what they could do, instead scrounging for fuel and torpedoes, mostly used as mail transport vehicles or sitting idly, rarely seeing combat activity.  As they ask for increasingly more dangerous missions, however, Ford’s visualization at sea is extremely effective, with the boats roaring into battle like a cavalry charge, offering a visceral experience that becomes even more harrowing, particularly after taking heavy casualties and losing the majority of the boats they came with.  Perhaps the centerpiece of the film is transporting General Douglas MacArthur (Robert Barrat) and several high-ranking officers under cover of darkness from Corregidor (surrounded by the Japanese) more than 500 miles over two days to Mindanao, braving mines and rough seas, avoiding detection by patrolling Japanese warships, where they could then safely escape to Australia, Patriotic Movie Scene of General MacArthur from "They Were Expendable" YouTube (1:16), an act which earned every member of the squadron the Silver Star.

Ford never shows the face of the enemy, avoiding bloodthirsty images of their slaughter, where the thrust of the film is built around the camaraderie of the men, exclusively white, seen in everyday, ordinary life where they’re keen to make a difference, and seen in highly pressurized situations, performing in combat, where viewers get to know many of the faces of the squadron, called by affectionate nicknames, where there’s a playful air about them, using plenty of sarcasm to voice their displeasure, meeting and drinking in the watering hole afterwards, seen relieving plenty of stress.  Songs are sung, music is played, with Ford integrating the wholesome beauty of Donna Reed to symbolically remind the troops of just what they were fighting for, as most have an image of the girl back home, where Reed easily fits into that role.  But in the male dominated war operations, women are few and hard to come by, yet Reed holds her own, providing a needed medical service, bravely patching up the men and sending them back to their squadrons.  Similarly, many of the boats remain out of commission in a state of emergency repair, where Russell Simpson, Pa Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), plays a crazy old coot known as “Dad” Knowland who repairs the PT boats, a cantankerous old man who would be out of place in any civil society, insufferably individualistic, standing his ground even after all the others have left the island, refusing to leave the place he’s lived and worked for 40 years, seen with a rifle in his hand and a bottle of hooch, with the strains of Red River Valley heard in the background (reportedly Ford’s favorite song), waiting for the Japanese Army to arrive where he’ll take them all on single-handed, They were expendable clip - YouTube (51 seconds).  As much as anything, this perfectly expresses the insanity of war, as there is no good outcome, just a profoundly lingering tragedy, with so many troops abandoned at Bataan and left to suffer an all but certain doom, discovering that during times of war, “they were expendable,” forced to sacrifice themselves to slow the methodical advance of the Japanese Army.  The bleak tone of the film is always understated, as are the brief romance scenes, where the romance barely has a chance to survive before they are separated, leaving an ambiguous ending surrounding many of the characters, their fates remaining unknown, exactly as it is in times of war.  In real life, only nine out of 111 men in the original squadron made it out of the Philippines alive, while most of the 80 or so Army and Navy nurses (known as the Angels of Bataan) spent the rest of the war confined to a Japanese POW camp, along with tens of thousands of U.S. and Filipino soldiers.  Like most Ford films, his racist views make it to the screen, but unlike Indians and blacks, his normal targets, his depiction of Filipinos is very much like his dehumanized depiction of Indians, speaking broken English, only a few words, completely overlooked, barely even viewed as human, but when they run around yelling “Jap come, Jap come,” it reflects how the enemy and even our own allies are continually demonized in cinema, where in Ford’s lifetime this incendiary human devaluation is never rectified, but instead normalized, remaining part and parcel with his artistic aesthetic, as warning signs of white supremacy simply reoccur ad nauseum throughout his films with continuing regularity.  To his credit, however, Ford demanded from MGM’s Louis B. Mayor the highest price ever paid to a director, then donated it all to the 21-acre ranch known as the Field Photo Farm, Field Photo Farm - The American Story, a memorial to 13 members of his unit in the Field Photographic Division of the Offices of Strategic Services who had died in the war, mostly comprised of cinematographers, actors and writers, including writers Garson Kanin and Budd Schulberg, cinematographer Gregg Toland, editor Robert Parrish, and special effects expert Ray Kellogg, providing a place where veterans of the unit could come with their families and enjoy the comradeship they enjoyed during the war.  In 1946 there were 176 active members, with a free and open invitation to stay at the farm whenever they wished, eventually falling into disuse when it closed in 1965.  Ford built a chapel on the property and inside the words of English poet A.E. Housman were inscribed offering his WWI reflections:  

Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung.