Too often were colonial stories glazed with glorification that it makes sense why director Lav Diaz pours a gallon of demystification into his film adaptation of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. He ensures the audience won’t get any grand sense of historical adventure, favoring a more draining yet humanistic depiction of the emptiness lurking in the internal depths of this voyage. While this does make Magellan an incredibly slow-moving epic, it’s an epic free of misinterpretation, offering a refreshing dose of the dour.

From the start, the ambitions of Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) are exposed for their stumbling. Despite witnessing the inhumanity of the Capture of Malacca, he still adheres to the mission statements of leaders like Afonso de Albuquerque (Roger Alan Koza), proclaiming that Portugal shall dominate the world, while falling over drunk as he speaks. Part of that spread involves the conversion of outsiders to Christianity, but as some native slaves reveal in private, their original spirituality remains. Even one disheartened man condemning greed is scorned by Magellan, refusing to see the fault in his trade route voyage.

While the voyage at sea does look remarkable, there isn’t an ounce of pleasure on this adventure. Moments of mutiny are quickly squashed as the paranoia of Magellan slowly takes hold of his mind. There’s no return from this madness, where even the lingering spirit of his wife exists less as an angel enhancing his spirituality and more like a ghost haunting a decaying house. There is no comfort for someone as lustful for power. The arrival on the island of Cebu in the Philippines offers hope to the men drained by the voyage, but the forced conversion of the natives won’t go as planned. A statuette of Santo Niño curing a sick child might turn the tribe towards the religion, but the burning of their spiritual idols is an aggressive step worthy of war. Mythology becomes a weapon for the natives, with chieftain Rajah Humabon (Ronnie Lazaro) luring Magellan into a war he will not win.

Lav Diaz makes a controversial call by favoring a story that portrays Lapulapu as more of a myth than a historical figure who defeated Magellan, despite historians’ dispute. For those willing to let Diaz take the wheel of artistic license, this framing does bode well for a film that doesn’t want to embrace the glory of such a story. There is no Lapulapu to rally behind as the film nears its bloody conclusion. Transforming the Battle of Mactan into one more about the determination of a people rather than one hero removes any central figure to rally behind. It’s a violent finale that places no theatrical tone of victory or defeat over scenes of beheading the invading Spanish forces.

There’s a refreshing realism in how Diaz sets out to make Magellan a period piece that resists digestible theatrics. The battles are either set in the distance or witnessed only in the aftermath, with the carnage viewed more as a tragedy than a skirmish. Scenes that could favor romance, adventure, or honor are slammed on the brakes, slowing the drama down a degree to a meditative pace where there’s little chance of being swept up in the costumes and cinematography. For the liberties that it takes with history, the route of revising for the sake of draining the grand glory is admirable. Where other films want to retool for the sake of being more entertaining, Diaz indulges the opposite, where Magellan is more of a muted man with ambitions drained of anything more than the most tragically believable of egotism. Sometimes history isn’t that magical; sometimes it’s just dirty, quiet, and filled with a maddening silence with no answers.

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