Magalhães
Jesus, this is tough. Nearly 3h, 4:3, no music except some diegetic chants, literally all shots are fixed cameras (except some minor rocking boats), no close ups or any basic cinematic flair, Inception-level dialogue mixing.
The plot is barebones to the max. It’s not a biopic, it starts on his second to last voyage, as he gets the idea to bypass all the complications to get to the spices islands.
The Portuguese king he dedicated his life to is not having any of that. Word on the street is that his mathematicians were clever enough to stop him from dumping money on a wild goose chase. The Spanish royal family is more gullible, so he gets his expedition, with a loan from the Fuggers, the Renaissance Goldman Sachs.
Why not skip the African coast, Venetian, Arabic, Indian and other competitors? Just go around all that! The Pacific Ocean is the answer. A gruelling and endless journey. After mutinies, revolts, and death from cold and heat, they arrive to Cebu at last. After healing some kid with the “power of Christ” (actually fruit jam) and cargo culting some faithful even through they can’t even understand the language, they bite more they can chew when the foreigners burn every idol they find.
Those are probably ancient effigies, the equivalent of desecrating a graveyard, so the “primitives” trick the captain into a skirmish they lose. Only the Malaca slave/stringer survives.
Magellan wasn’t even the first human to circumnavigate the world. In the real world, it was either his slave that continued with Elcano, or Francis Drake and his crew a few decades later, plus some nephew of Loyola (the Spanish Inquisition dude). Drake’s trip was mostly about looting Spanish gold for Gloriana, the Portuguese were too clever by half.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.