Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992)

After hearing so many bad reviews for this movie, I knew I had to see it because I often find big budget disasters entertaining. Though that was no easy task, since the movie has never been released on DVD and has never popped up on any of the TV channels in my area (the last one probably because of the nudity in the movie.) I finally found it in a video store that still rents out VHS tapes. Well, is it as bad as you've heard? Yeah, it's pretty bad. The acting is pretty awful and the big names in the cast seem ill at ease throughout. The movie also has a poor sense of time, with periods that took a long time in real life condensed in what seems like a couple of weeks. And despite the fairly lavish budget, a lot of the movie looks surprisingly cheap and slapdash. (For example, a lot of the time when the ships are at sea, it's clear the boats are floating just a few feet from land.) As for the character of Christopher Columbus, you never get a feel of a real character, or feel what drives him or what he really feels. If you want to find out more about Columbus, I strongly suggest you go to your local library instead of sitting through this phoniness.Now, to find a copy of 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE...

Corny, goofy, and with some of the worst non-acting you ever saw: It doesn't get much worse than Tom Selleck as an effete fop. Try and hear him say "Por-too-gahl" without busting out laughing.Or Rachel Ward playing Queen Isabela as a shallow minded slut who gives Columbus money because she was horny for him. Seriously, this film claims that! Try and reconcile that with the real life history: Isabella was a sharp, powerful queen who presided over the uniting of her nation, and one of the most devout Catholics to ever be on the throne. There's good reason she's called Isabela La Catolica and the Defender of the Faith.And Columbus as a supposed charming rake? (Actually this actor comes across as a conceited ass in love with his own reflection.)Oh yeah, and showing his wife as a hot young thing...Columbus married a widow older than him, for her money.Please! Columbus was a driven, obsessed religious fanatic who thought the world was coming to an end in hislifetime, a believer in The End Times who thought he would play a role in Arrmageddon.Which, of course, is the worst thing the film does. It whitewashes genocide, doesn't show Columbus as the man who killed at least 800,000 Taino Indians, chopping off hand if they didn't give him enough gold, handing over Indian girls for his soldiers to rape as rewards for jobs well done, feeding Indian bodies to his dogs, and personally raping Indian women and enslaving both Indians and Africans. And he went to prison in Spain, for falsely imprisoning and torturing Spaniards.Skip this travesty and see the far better films, Surviving Columbus or Columbus Didn't Discover Us. And unlike this sanitized fiction, these two films are the truth. And you can find them for free on Youtube.

Do not go into this movie expecting a strictly serious biography of Christopher Columbus. This is an adventure movie by the same producers of The Three Musketeers, The Four Musketeers, Superman: The Movie, Superman II, Superman III, Supergirl, and Santa Claus: The Movie. It was directed by the same director of Iron Eagle III, License To Kill, Living Daylights, View To A Kill, and Octopussy. All of that means this isn't a serious historical biography and was never intended to be. It's a swashbuckling version of the legend of Columbus that's also cautionary tale about the destructive power of greed. It's also family entertainment so don't expect it to be too dull or deep. I look forward to the day when this movie is available on DVD.

This seems really to be an old-fashioned adventure film, the kind the studios churned out in great numbers in the 1940's. Maybe an Errol Flynn vehicle. That's the way Georges Corraface plays it, and it's okay. Not great, but okay. Marlon Brando totally mailed it in, as he was wont to do in his later years. Tom Selleck is a wonderful actor, but he really couldn't pull it off in this one. Rachel Ward was much more believable as Queen Isabella, regal, with more than a little bit of religious fanaticism. She also played it with minimal make-up, looking very forty-ish, something many actresses of her stature and beauty would have refused. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Benicio del Toro put in decent showings, given the limitations of the material. The scriptwriters were probably in a bit of a quandary, since the occasion (500th anniversary) called for a hagiography, but on the other hand, political correctness makes Colon out to be a villain. They tried to split the difference, and it didn't work. But over-all, this film is not as bad as some make it out to be. Oh, and mention must be made of the beauty of Tailinh Forest Flower as the Indian chieftain's daughter. Wow!