This 1992 movie was shot in Costa Rica using natives from South America in order to depict with some accuracy the habitat and people that Columbus found 500 years before on his famous voyage of discovery. The fact that there are no indigenous people and very little indigenous habitat left in the islands that Columbus discovered, kind of gives away the story. The Spaniards found Paradise and turned it into Hell—taking the Garden of Eden down to Sodom and Gomorrah in a mere decade. If you are familiar with the brutally sad story of Haiti—it begins with Columbus and continued down the mudslide of colonial history.

The movie makers committed a minimal number of anachronistic sins considering the level of condensation necessary to reduce a life as tumultuous as Columbus’ to two hours. The crucifix being struck by lightning was one of the few over the top Hollywood moments that made me wince.

Where the Conquest of Paradise really shines is, first, in the credit/prologue, which utilizes woodcuts from a period book depicting the butchery of West Indies natives by Europeans, and second in its depiction of Columbus as a doomed mystic—a Taboo Man. As a fighter I have tended to discuss the concept of the Taboo Man in the context of defiant fighting men who stood against, or outside of, the greater society. However, the more usual taboo personage is the shaman, the mystic, the weirdo with the strange ideas and eccentricities, who is needed by the greater society for the very same reason why he is alienated from that same society—because he has a different perspective.

Columbus—an Italian—was an outsider among the Spanish to begin with. What made his presence nigh intolerable to many of his fellow explorers was his common origin. Columbus lived in a medieval society. The fact that he was accepted as the leader of an expedition ranks up there in improbability with the U.S. President nominating Fred Reed as Secretary of State. What was more, not only was Columbus not of the noble class, he was not a fighting man, though the movie makers tried to depict him as such. The very fact that the 20th Century sissies who made this movie did not think that Columbus would come off as a believable leader if he could not fight gives us barely a hint at the hurdles the dreamy navigator faced on his second, colonizing, voyage in command of the first wave of conquistadors. That—even for a season—this pie in the sky eccentric lorded it over the vanguard of the men who would murder a world in the very same breath it was discovered speaks to his visionary force of mind.

In terms of his time, and the Spanish and native tribesmen he found himself alternately helping, hindering, and exploiting, Columbus was thoroughly doomed to fail as a colonial administrator. For the few failings of the film, it shines as a tragic tale of an outsider and underling trying to make for himself a place as an overlord of the insiders.

However, society retains a use for taboo men, who do have their unusual talents. Columbus was eventually restored as a leader of exploratory expeditions, which is noted in the epilogue of 1492—The Conquest of Paradise. He had another epic voyage ahead of him, in which he managed—in his old age—to save an expedition that was literally cursed by man and gods through his navigational skills. None of this is depicted in the movie, but does justify the bitter sweet tone of the closing scenes.

Most of all, Ridley Scott’s depiction of the rise, fall and salvation of Columbus, is a taut exposition of the type of man who often propels the very society that rejects him into the uncertain future.