TheMovieVampire’s review published on Letterboxd:
There was a time when I was absolutely desperate to see this movie. At the time I was really interested in seeing all of Ridley Scott’s movies and this one wasn’t available on DVD at all and by the time it did become more available I had kind of moved on from the notion that seeing every Ridley Scott movie was a worthwhile goal. I ended up finally finding the damn movie on CBS All Access of all things and decided to give it a watch. Turns out this infamous box office bomb that no one bothered to put out on DVD isn’t very good. I’ll give the movie this, it’s certainly a Ridley Scott film and gives you the production value and elaborate sets you expect from him but that’s kind of where the films virtues end. This comes from a very brief period where Hollywood was trying to make Gérard Depardieu into a mainstream star and while I can kind of see a logic to his casting in this part I don’t think he really carries the movie. But as you can probably guess the film is ultimately going to live or die by how it chooses to depict Columbus and his legacy. I had hoped based on the title that the film would have been more of a warts and all portrayal of the guy but alas it isn’t really. This probably sits next to Pocahontas as one of the 90s movies that has enough self-awareness to know that American settlement was not good for Native Americans but does not have the conviction to really call out its “hero.” Instead the trick they try to pull is to acknowledge the atrocities that occurred in Hispaniola but to then place all the blame on other people while downplaying Columbus’ complicity in all of it. The movie depicts Columbus himself as this dreamer who just wants to peacefully co-exist with the indigenous population, which simply isn’t true. Regardless of whether you’re offended by this distortion of history, the movie is still a slog that goes on way too long and falls into a lot of the normal traps that historical biopics fall into.