“Magellan” opens with a young girl looking through a dense thicket of foliage and spotting something alarming. We can anticipate the identity of these white men, whose rather dinky vessel belies the world-straddling mythology that tends to accompany conquistadors of Ferdinand Magellan’s stature. They seem small here, diminished by the vastness of the new world into which their vessel precariously sails. Even the national Filipino hero Lapulapu, whose forces slew Magellan and are still enshrined in the history of anti-colonial resistance, is treated as a phantom here. In an early scene, Magellan casually, cruelly acquires a slave, the sound of whose grief wracks the rest of the movie.