1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992)

Christopher Columbus (Gérard Depardieu) and crew take their first steps ashore.

Movie rating: 4/10

Every filmmaker has the right to artistic license when making a movie based on historical events. As most would no doubt admit, they are storytellers, not historians, and as such their overriding aim is telling a good story. But particularly when dealing with a figure of world-historic significance like Christopher Columbus, one has to ask what story the filmmaker has chosen to tell, and why. A great film could have been made that depicted the reality of Christopher Columbus. But that’s not the story Ridley Scott wanted to tell when he directed 1492: Conquest of Paradise, written by Roselyne Bosch. Scott’s heroic depiction of Columbus, played by Gérard Depardieu, is so at odds with the facts, it fatally undermines the film for anyone with the slightest concern for historical truth.

One of two films about Columbus released on the 500th anniversary of his first voyage, 1492 presents us with a glorified version of the same old myth taught to generations of schoolchildren: Columbus as the great explorer who “discovered” America, and in doing so proved the world was round. Yet it also goes out of its way to depict him as respectful, tolerant, and peaceful to the Indigenous peoples he met, which is such a blatant inversion of reality it qualifies as an example of the “big lie” propaganda technique. Other commentators have pointed out the movie’s historical inaccuracies, which are too numerous to list here. A good starting point is the list compiled by Ben Rowe.

Some viewers might dismiss these concerns as of purely academic interest. But the fact is that falsely portraying Columbus in such benevolent terms whitewashes his legacy of genocide and enslavement. The horrific legacy of European colonialism has had lasting impacts that continue to this day in the oppression and intergenerational trauma of Indigenous peoples. If we want to understand the mentality of the European settlers who spearheaded one of the worst genocides in history, we need to understand Christopher Columbus—the real Christopher Columbus, not the sanitized figure Scott presents us with here.

To start with, the idea that Columbus proved the world was round is a long-debunked falsehood. Every educated person since the ancient Greeks had known the Earth to be round. Indeed, the Erdapfel, the oldest surviving spherical globe of the Earth (sans the Americas), was produced immediately before Columbus made his voyage across the Atlantic. Scott brings out this old chestnut to present Columbus as a man who was correct when everyone around him was wrong. Yet in a subsequent scene where Columbus faces off against clergy, the disagreement seems to be the distance to Japan over the Earth’s surface, not the shape of the Earth. Which is it?

Central to the movie’s whitewashing of Columbus is in its presentation of his relationships with the Taíno, the Indigenous people of the Caribbean he encounters. Here are the words of Movie Columbus:

October 21st, 1492. I think we have returned to Eden. Surely this is how the world was in the beginning of time. If the natives are to be converted to our ways, then it will be by persuasion and not by force. I believe no man will ever see this land again as we do, for the first time. We come in peace and with honor. They are not savages, neither will we be. Treat them as you would your own wives and children. Respect their beliefs. Pillage will be punished by the whip. Rape, by the sword.

The real Columbus, by comparison, was happy to use force against the Indigenous people, and in such a brutal way it shocked even his contemporaries, such as Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas. For example, Columbus punished every Indigenous person 14 and older enslaved in the mines who failed to produce a certain amount of gold by ordering their hands cut off, leaving them to bleed to death. Like so many of Columbus’s atrocities, 1492 attempts to lay them at the feet instead of ridiculously cartoonish villain Adrián de Moxica (Michael Wincott). In the film, it is Moxica who cuts off an Indigenous man’s hand, which horrifies Columbus and others.

Here’s the real Columbus in his own words speaking about the Indigenous population of the Caribbean:

They should be good servants [read: slaves—M.P.] and intelligent, for I observed that they quickly took in what was said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, as it appeared to me that they had no religion, our Lord being pleased, will take hence, at the time of my departure, six natives for your Highnesses that they may learn to speak.

According to Michele de Cuneo, who participated in Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas, Columbus kidnapped and enslaved more than 1,000 people on the island of Hispaniola. Far from forbidding pillage, Columbus forced Indigenous people to collect gold for the Spaniards or die. Far from punishing rape “by the sword”, Columbus kidnapped a Caribbean woman and gave her to Cuneo to rape. Columbus himself admitted in a letter to Doña Juana de la Torre, a friend of the Spanish queen, that he sold 9- and 10-year-old girls into sexual slavery: “There are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand, and for all ages a good price must be paid.” Historian Laurence Bergreen estimates that 56 years after Columbus’s first voyage, only 500 Indigenous inhabitants of Hispaniola remained out of a population of 300,000.

I could go on and on detailing Columbus’s crimes, and those of the other European settlers he inspired. Anyone with even a casual knowledge of Columbus will be aware of the monstrous evils he was responsible for. The film attributes such atrocities to figures like Moxica. Another technique of Scott’s is to depict the suffering of Indigenous people in ways that obfuscate Columbus’s responsibility. We see several Taíno brought back to Spain, but the movie never asks what say the Taíno had in the matter. We see hundreds of Indigenous people forced to provide gold for the Spaniards, but we don’t see them actually working in the mines, or how they ended up providing forced labour to begin with. The answer is through brutal violence: the opposite of what Movie Columbus counsels.

1492 depicts Columbus as a skilled navigator, rather than the poor navigator he was. It paints him as a dreamer, but minimizes his less romantic reasons for sailing west to find a route to Asia—namely, the insane lust for gold Columbus shared with his contemporaries, part of the primitive accumulation of capital needed for the developing capitalist economy. David García Colín Carrillo writes that Columbus “was driven to travel into the unknown by the promise of fame, the purchase of noble titles and the allure of becoming a ‘king of islands’. It was a curious combination, mixing the eagerness of a bourgeois to accumulate wealth with the desire to spend it in the manner of a feudal lord.” He continues:

When the promise of items from the East and gold in large quantities was frustrated, Columbus did not hesitate to enslave the indigenous populations, massacring them where they resisted. His refusal to accept that the lands he had reached were not the coasts of China, Japan or India was owed simply to the fact that he needed to present the terms of the contract with the Spanish crown as having been fulfilled. The latter stipulated that only should he find a new route to Asia would the promised benefits and privileges be granted: “on the one hand pecuniary concessions and on the other political privileges of undoubted feudal flavour.”

For a movie that sells itself as telling the story of an important historical figure, 1492 completely fails. So why don’t I rate this movie lower? Simply put, because Scott is a technically skilled director adept at stunning visuals, and 1492 is a well-made film. As a history buff, I can’t help but appreciate the surface-level things this film got right, such as the period sets, costumes, and props. Vangelis also provides a fantastic score. Scott films everything with an epic grandeur, a highlight being the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria setting sail across the Atlantic. As despicable a figure as Columbus was, sailing into the unknown at this time, given contemporary lack of knowledge, undoubtedly required a level of courage.

That sentiment, I think, is what compelled Scott to direct the film in the first place. It also leads to the most memorable scene: when Columbus’s crew finally spot land, which appears cinematically through the mist, and walk ashore. A variation of this scene was ingrained in me growing up through the film’s teaser trailer, included on VHS copies of Wayne’s World. Juxtaposing audio from the U.S. space program with Columbus climbing out of his boat and dropping to his knees on the shores of the New World, the teaser gets to the heart of what many continue to admire about Columbus: the idea of an explorer venturing into a new frontier.

Unfortunately, if you’re tackling a historical figure like Columbus, and you don’t want to just end the film there, you have to account for his actions after he landed in the New World. It’s on that point that 1492 gets worse and worse as the film goes on. When it becomes obvious that we are watching a character who not only diverts from the real Columbus, but in some ways is the polar opposite of him, it makes the film feel at best like sloppy pseudo-history—and at worst like celebration of a mass murderer, enslaver, child trafficker, and architect of genocide.

There are a lot of historical films with gross inaccuracies that are nevertheless enjoyable to watch. Braveheart is my go-to example: the film is worthless as a history lesson, with glaring and ridiculous anachronisms, but effective as a bloody war epic. Scott’s own Gladiator is more accurate, and also solid entertainment. Unfortunately, 1492 doesn’t work nearly as well as either in terms of drama.

That comes down largely to the writing, though Depardieu is merely adequate as Columbus. His accent can be a bit distracting, but I was willing to let that slide because Columbus was an Italian among Spaniards. Characters are written inconsistently: Gabriel Sánchez (Armand Assante), the Spanish royal treasurer, at first backs Columbus’s voyage, but as Rowe notes, is later shown “turning against Columbus for no real reason.” None of the other characters are all that interesting even when played by good actors, such as Sigourney Weaver in the role of Queen Isabella I. Moxica is such a one-dimensional villain—looking like one of the Malfoys in Harry Potter with hair dyed black—you have to wonder if the screenwriter included him purely as a scapegoat for crimes actually committed by Columbus.

Good production values can’t make up for a film that distorts history this much, on a topic this serious. Columbus’s accomplishments as an explorer were totally inadvertent—he was dead wrong that he had reached Asia—and cannot be separated from his genocidal legacy as the spearhead of European colonization of the Americas. A braver filmmaker might have balanced both those aspects of Columbus’s life. There have been films made about unsympathetic historical figures who committed hideous crimes, such as the Stalin TV movie starring Robert Duvall, also released in 1992. But directing a big-budget Hollywood epic, Scott couldn’t resist falling back on the false and destructive myth of Columbus as American hero.

Even if that seemed like the easier option at the time, audiences didn’t respond, and the film underwhelmed at the box office. History will judge the makers of 1492 even more harshly than contemporary moviegoers did.