I had to spend money to endure anguish last week when I watched Magellan, a biopic of Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan.
That I had to patronize a movie that I don’t want to succeed at the box office was really ironic. Luckily, there were only six of us who watched it at the SM Seaside for three hours, so I guess the movie isn’t really turning out to be a blockbuster.
To start with, the film seems to assume that everybody knows about Magellan and can readily put together jumbled pieces of his life and dreams into one comprehensible tale.
Fraught with inaccuracies such as depicting the natives of Cebu as naked jaybirds, the movie seems unaware of historical records such as the Boxer Codex describing pre-Spanish inhabitants of the Philippines as having worn clothes.
It also doesn’t help that it repeatedly features incoherent and irksome chants of native characters including Enrique whom Magellan bought as a slave in Malacca. Dim and murky, many of its prolonged scenes which were shot mostly on location in some drab European neighborhoods and tropical wetlands don’t really attract nor hold much interest.
In fact, the movie doesn’t show any rich European medieval society scenes or ocean waves lapping at the expedition’s three galleons instead of the historically-accurate five.
But cinematography isn’t really the movie’s mortal sin. Its biggest blunder is when the character of Rajah Humabon, the King of Cebu who gets tired of Magellan’s imposing presence in his village leads him to a ploy involving a “wakwak” named Lapulapu. In Cebuano folklore, the word refers to a mythical vampiric winged creature that hunts for human blood at night.
It is simply unbelievable that a Filipino film would ridicule our country’s first national hero in such a humiliating manner.
The foremost authority of Magellan’s expedition, Antonio Pigafetta, wrote so clearly about a human Lapulapu it makes us wonder why the movie makes him into a despicable imaginary figure.
World historians have also long acknowledged Lapulapu’s heroic existence in the 1521 Battle of Mactan. Even the Encyclopedia Brittanica, that 1786-founded reference platform whose writers include Nobel Laureates and world leaders, agrees.
Yet this movie mocks Lapulapu’s contributions to our national identity and cultural heritage by turning an established historical fact into distasteful fiction.
What’s even worse is that this flick is now the Philippine’s official entry to the 98th Academy Awards. How could our film development authorities and the National Historical Commission of the Philippines allow this to happen?
My suspicion is that this movie may be intended to reinforce Eurocentric views that the noble and dashing Magellan, a product of European schools and a naval officer, was not slaughtered like a hog by a tattooed native chieftain who has never even set foot in the Royal Alcazar.
Europe, after all, is known for cleverly setting historical narratives in its favor. Remember, it was Europe that credited Magellan for “discovering” the Philippines even if our ancestors have been dealing with merchants from other countries long before he came.
No wonder, Spain and Portugal willingly assisted in this film’s production design, momentarily putting aside their centuries-old feud over Magellan just to rally behind the European banderole.
For all it’s worth, the movie Magellan is really loaded with many faults and weaknesses. But the crux of the matter is its utter disrespect to Lapulapu, indicating that our resistance against colonialism hasn’t really ended just yet.