YMMV / 1492: Conquest of Paradise

• Americans Hate Tingle: Filmic aspects aside, the movie keeps an ill reputation among Spanish critics as a fist-pumping example of the Spanish Black Legend, in this case to the extent of portraying history exactly backwards and having the Genoese Christopher Columbus, whom even the Spaniards of his time would come to consider a criminal, portrayed as saintly and heroic in stark contrast to the racist and murderous Kingdom of Spain.
• Awesome Music: The score by Vangelis, particularly the eponymous theme, is simply unforgettable.
• Complete Monster: Adrián de Moxica is imagined as Christopher Columbus's Arch-Enemy, a Spanish blackguard who immediately sees it fit to start indiscriminately slaughtering Native tribes the second he has pretext to. Swayed against this by Columbus, Moxica enslaves the natives instead, lopping off the hand of one who fails to bring him any gold. Moxica attempts to lead a bloody mutiny against Columbus and spitefully commits suicide when this fails, mocking Columbus over how his dreams of a new Eden have failed.
• Memetic Mutation: The glum description of Spain given in the prologue, especially the point about men being "persecuted for daring to dream", is sometimes sarcastically quoted by critics of the Black Legend. It was so memorable that popular Spanish historian Javier Rubio Donzé used the quote to promote his book about the topic in 2023, thirty years after the film was released.
• Questionable Casting: The famously French Gérard Depardieu being cast as the famously Italian Columbus raised more than a few eyebrows, though upon release many critics conceded that he did a damn good job in a film which was otherwise mediocre at best.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many have suggested that the film would have worked better as a miniseries than as a theatrical film, thus adding some much-needed depth to the plot and characterization and potentially avoiding the Politically Correct History for which the film has often been criticized.
• Uncertain Audience: Considering historical colonists are not in vogue anymore, the film clearly didn't appeal to wide audiences, but given that it also gave Columbus a high level of Historical Hero Upgrade, it alienated history buffs too — and given that it also left Spain with a purple eye by giving them a Historical Villain Upgrade blatant even for the usual standards, the film also managed to ruin its safest crowd. It's not hard to see why it failed.
• Values Dissonance: While the film's Politically Correct History made it unpopular in its original release and was undoubtedly a major factor in its failure, as the collective narrative of Columbus and other Spanish/European colonizers being genocidal monsters has since become more widely accepted as a fact rather than interpretation (including among historians), a movie where he's depicted as benevolent to the natives now comes off as outright racist propaganda.

---