No sooner had I landed in Manila than I rushed to the film center on the university campus in Diliman—it was showing Magellan. I had flown in from France, where the movie had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2025. It was also selected as the Philippine entry to the Oscars for the international film category this year.
Neither occasion seemed to have made any traction of great importance. No matter. I was home and this was my chance to see it, because I didn’t know when or where it would be showing again. Magellan was Lav Diaz’s latest obra. His reputation for making long films, as long as eight hours, was an antidote to jetlag.
Magellan was only three hours long for commercial release. I sat through it bravely and patiently, waiting for that moment when the director reveals his craft. It came in the end; but before that, my brother, who accompanied me, had had enough: He left the movie house to get his dinner at Rodic’s, the campus’s iconic canteen.
Although the film spanned the life of the cursed Portuguese explorer, the denouement ended in—not unexpectedly—his tragic death on the shore of Mactan. We all know the ending to this story. In schoolrooms all over the country, it was: Class, who discovered the Philippines? And that’s how we learned about the white man. Class, who killed Magellan? And that’s how we named a fish after the native warrior Lapu-Lapu.
In Lav Diaz’s epic, Lapu-Lapu does not exist (spoiler alert!). He was not seen, therefore he was made up in the imagination of Humabon, chief of the Cebu island, a supposed rival to Lapu-Lapu. That deception was meant to confuse the mind of Magellan for destroying the wooden gods of idolatry in the homes of Humabon’s people, who had agreed to be baptized as Christians on the sheer example of a miracle they believed was performed by the statue of the infant Jesus offered by Magellan.
(Today, the Sinulog festival in Cebu, held at the start of every year, gives honor and celebration to the Santo Niño, the very image of the infant Jesus.)
This version of history was the jaw-dropping part, not the mind-boggling voyage that Magellan had undertaken in 1519 and which landed him in the Philippines two years later—what was supposed to be a stopover in his search for Muluku, the spice islands that he was to hand over to Spain, a rival empire to neighboring Portugal. After all that he had been through—deaths, mutinies, fear, hunger, cold, in his fleet of five ships—Magellan’s name in history was crushed by his tragic death.
Lav Diaz added to the myth of Lapu-Lapu by creating another myth around the native warrior. It is true that virtually nothing is known about this man. The statue we see in Cebu is drawn out of a wild imagination, that just because Lapu-Lapu was said to have killed Magellan, a white man at that, he was given the physique of a gym trainer, standing brave with his shield the size of a surfboard, and of course holding the formidable spear that wrongly embodies nationhood.
Just because Lapu-Lapu was said to have killed Magellan, he was given the physique of a gym trainer, standing brave with his shield the size of a surfboard
Cebu’s eminent historian Resil Mojares had given a different light to the image of Lapu-Lapu shoved down our throat. During a webinar at the height of the pandemic, when academics flourished in their storytelling, Mojares said Lapu-Lapu was himself not at the scene of the battle. He was the commander, and commanders stay behind the frontlines. What made Magellan personally jump off his ship to fight the natives was an act of folly (and this is for another bigger, impressive story about the man).
From his researched accounts, Mojares said Lapu-Lapu might have been in his 70s—an old man indeed, maybe a seer who was a ruler, maybe a wise man who was protective of his domain. Why did Magellan get so upset when Lapu-Lapu wouldn’t convert to Christianity, as per Humabon, in the film? Was Lav Diaz correct in giving in to the version of a mirage, a make-believe image of an angry man? Was Magellan, who had done so well and so brave as captain general of his armada, so spent and so paranoid at that juncture in his voyage ?
So in the movie, Lapu-Lapu was nowhere, totally non-existent. A mere ghost. A trick of history. Only because Humabon had found a way to get rid of the white man he’d been friendly with, giving us the impression that it was his lie that actually killed Magellan. Do we now make Humabon the hero, or the traitor? Added to the twist of this film was how Magellan’s Malay slave Enrique had betrayed his master by playing along with the lie, because he was after his freedom.
(Let’s backtrack a bit: Magellan, in his last testament, wrote that in the event of his death, Enrique should be set free and receive equal treatment as any citizen. That didn’t happen.)
From what he had read in his own research, Mojares said Lapu-Lapu was last seen in Borneo (perhaps in what is now Banjarmasin) after that ill-fated battle in Mactan. There has not been anything written about Lapu-Lapu except for a book of fiction that outrageously describes the warrior with the inborn strength of a Tarzan. Whether or not he existed, why haven’t we found anything else about him after five centuries? Was this the point of Lav Diaz’s movie?
If it is, he has made a coward, a ruthless one nonetheless, of a man who achieved one of the greatest voyages in the history of humanity. Magellan had done more than what Christopher Columbus had set out to do. He navigated from the Atlantic Ocean, down to the tail of South America, and crossed the Pacific Ocean in what was then the great unknown. He was the only one who braved the sea, who saw the sea as the only way out of being caught between the powers of Portugal and Spain.
I’m afraid Lav Diaz didn’t do much justice to the man after whom the movie was named. We see the Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, playing the lead role, standing by the ship’s mast, looking out to nowhere. What happened to the guy in The Motorcycle Diaries, Y Tu Mama Tambien? Lav Diaz didn’t do him justice either, with the exception of two poignant scenes: when he meets his wife and when his wife feels he is dead. In both cases, however, it is the woman who played the part well.
In real life, Magellan’s story did not end in the Philippines. World historians say his exploration gave birth to globalization when the map during that period had a meridian dividing the world between one where Portugal can navigate and Spain on the other. The Philippines wasn’t “discovered” by Magellan, either; if we continue this narrative as a copy of Columbus setting foot in the new land of the Americas, I think it’s time that we finally change our history books.
If there is something more to be learned about Magellan, it was how and why a boy—he was only 12 when Columbus became famous—dared to dream of being the best sailor in the entire world. As for Lapu-Lapu, let’s find him. To my surprise, I saw his portrait in a naval vessel during a visit to Sangley Point recently. He was there on a “Heroes’ Corner” next to Jose Rizal and Emilio Aguinaldo, historical figures of the 19th century, generations apart from Magellan’s. On this wall, Lapu-Lapu is no longer a traitor.
Yes, let’s find the man who has been misunderstood by history. Let’s listen to his story, from where it all began. Tell him that killing the white man was not his fault. Set his destiny straight, as we Filipinos should do too.
