Lousy series dealing with the first thirty years after Columbus' first voyage to the New World. So Christopher Columbus followed the route to Cathay and Cipango and found an unknown continent, which caused the world to change profoundly. If the Vikings were there, or perhaps the Chinese, the Egyptians or the Basques is irrelevant, the important thing was Columbus' feat.
A series that can be categorized as another film nail within the 'anti-Spanish Black Legend'. The film talks about many conquerors, but always from a negative and predatory point of view, concerning Christopher Columbus and other discoverers and conquistadors from highest to lowest rank including: Magellan, Juan Sebastian El Cano who made the first journey around the world, Vasoco Nuñez de Balboa discoverer of Pacific Ocean - the latter was executed by Pedrerias Davila-, Cortes, Pizarro, Alvarado, Panfilo de Narvaez discoverer of Florida, Ponce de León in search for eternal youth fountain, Jeronimo Aguilar, Gonzalo Guerrero, Ojeda, Cabeza de Vaca, the cartographer Santoñes Juan de la Cosa, among others. Spain left an unrepeatable legacy in the form of universities, hospitals, cathedrals with gilded altarpieces, as well as a fair legislative body such as the laws of Burgos of 1512 or the bases of international humanitarian law of the School of Salamanca in the 16th century, with its main representatives, pioneers of the fight for human rights: Francisco Suárez and Francisco de Vitoria, the latter considered the main founder of the School of Salamanca and father of international law and honoured by the United Nations; adding
the Valladolid Controversy, the famous debate that took place in 1551 at the College of San Gregorio in Valladolid, within the so-called controversy of the natives and which faced two antagonistic ways of conceiving the conquest of America, romantically interpreted as that of the defenders and that of the enemies of the Indians: the first, represented by Bartolomé de las Casas; and the second, by Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. This biased series does not want to highlight all these things, gloating over the negative, sordidness, exploitation, giving a destrictive, greedy, gold-hungry, absolutely genocidal image and focusing on the abuses that did occur, but in their fair terms.
Among the continuous nonsense, inaccuracies and exaggerations that appear in the series there are: continuous hangings, Bartholomew Columbus shooting simple natives as if he were shooting clay pigeons. Among the barbarities said by a voice-over (with words created by the director himself): the native Indians are treated by the Spanish worse than dogs; that on the discovery ships there were only people of bad living, thieves and slavers. Without stopping to criticize the evangelizing work of the Catholic Church, and laughing at Popes like Innocent VIII who is seen with sveral children and eager to drink a woman's milk, and appearing in the foreground a young woman's temptations taking said milk to feed him.
As soon as the technical section is done painfully, without order or concert, it goes from a discoverer and conqueror, and again returns to what had been left off in another episode. The series is therefore totally disjointed, uneven, twisted and frankly depressing. Adding a colorless, pale, dark cinematography, it would have been better if it had been done in black and white. While the actors, all unknown, except for the already aged Aitana Sanchez Gijón as Queen Isabel of Castile, are dedicated to declaiming or shouting the insipid phrases.
It is quite true that the greatest propagators of the Black legend are the Spanish themselves. Look at the case of this same series, or that of historical characters like traitor Antonio López , Felipe II's secretary, he betrayed his country because he did not achieve the favors that he wanted to deserve or the exaggerations of Bartolome de las Casas, apostle of the Indians, but who in his starts advocated bringing blacks from Africa to make them slaves, since they had no soul. Hatred of Spain has its biggest haters within our nation, because being close to something similar to Hispanophilia puts you at the same level as the infamous inquisitor Torquemada
But the main person responsible for this terrible and disastrous series is its writer and director Israel del Santo. The filmmaker is a presumptuous, conceited author who wrote and directed this terrible series, thanks to nefarious advisors from Telefonica, Moviestar, who really cannot believe that they finance his embarrassing series, - it could be that some of them are part of the family. So Israel himself, without any preparation, takes on the task of writing a historical series of 8 episodes, resulting in disastrous results. I have seen lots of series but I have never seen one in which the same showrunner is the director, not so in feature films where it is usual for the writing and direction to be by the same person. But besides, it is not only this one, Del Santo has also created other series in which he has also expelled his inner bile, such as "The Templars", in which they and the crusaders appeared as evil criminals who exterminated the peaceful and good Muslims, wrongly trying to kick them out of their own countries: Spain and the Holy Land. Thus he directed the series "The Heart of the Empire" in which the Roman men were truly vicious, brutal, who continually mistreated women and dedicated themselves fully to slavery. Gloating over nudism, the sordid, violent world of the Romans. I would advise this filmmaker to focus on interview series like "Lina¨ and Lola" and not dedicate himself to historical narratives that he is not prepared for, nor has any idea about. Rating: 2.5/10.
