The real story of Columbus is an adventure story with plenty of plot twists and interesting characters. So there was no need to fabricate history in this film. We have Columbus' journals that tell us what happened when he landed in the new world and the events that followed. This film set an agenda to make Columbus out to be a visionary who against the odds made good and the only problem was that everyone else didn't have his insight. Ridiculous! Columbus did something quite amazing in sailing to the new world but that doesn't mean that he didn't have serious flaws. For one, in the film he speaks about a "New World" but Columbus died believing he actually had found a passage to Asia so for him there was nothing new about it. The first encounter with the natives is also ridiculous in the film. In Columbus' journal we see that naked villagers came out onto the beach and that Columbus claimed the land for Spain and then took out his sword and tested the natives' knowledge of weapons. They had none and Columbus actually cut them. In the movie, Columbus is just walking through the jungle and he is approached by hostile natives ready to fire their arrows at him. He tells his men who are about to open fire to stop and that they must act peacefully. So Columbus becomes the peacemaker when in reality the natives were peaceful and he drew his sword on them. There are tons of these moments in the movie that make this movie a joke in terms of history. If directors are going to use real historical figures they need to represent them accurately. If they want to imagine or reimagine the colonial experience then they should use fictional characters.
Review of 1492: Conquest of Paradise
