The New World (2005)

Let me first say that I am a big fan of historical epics. As a matter of fact I joyfully sat through all 6+ hours of Bertolucci's "1900" in one sitting at a revival house; in short, I am not some dolt who wandered in because "Underworld 2" was sold out.

That said and trying to avoid hyperbole, this is among the most pretentious, self-flaggelating, ponderous pieces of bullshit ever forced upon an unsuspecting public. I was so bored I actually felt nauseated.

Mr. Malick does not know the first thing about dramatic writing-that is why 60% of the words heard in the film are voiceovers by John Smith, Pocohontas and The Tobacco Farmer That Looks Like a Movie Star-who even though they are respectively a military man, a Native American princess and a One Dimensional Plot Device all narrate with essentially the same voice. This gets old rather quickly. If all three of these characters have the ability to narrate, then from whose perspective is the story unfolding? The answer to that question is the obsessive camera that luxuriates on floral shots that look like they are outtakes from Walt Disney's True Life Adventure Series, while the real action is relegated offstage.

It is surely a case of The Emperor Has No Clothes here, people are afraid to call the movie painfully dull due to the pretensions of artsy-fartsy that are present; worried they will be accused of "not getting it." This is the reason that the reviews amongst professional critics are evenly split 50/50 between raves and pans, very few are middle ground. This alone should warn the moviegoer that one should tread forward with great caution if planning to see this snoozefest.

One last thought: He cut seventeen minutes from this? If it had gone on for seventeen minutes longer I would have woven Ju-Ju Bees into a rope and hung myself.

Fmovies: Quite possibly the most boring "epic" ever envisioned; If you like no dialog, lots of trees, swirling random cameras, trees, grass, silence, and trees, this is the movie for you. It's a mind-numbing 2+ hours that you'll never get back. You might actually hate yourself.

I'm sure the actual story of John Smith and the Native American girl (never called by her name) is somewhat interesting. This version is not. In fact, it's awful.

When I could no longer take it, I killed the DVD and lo an behold - I found 'Under Siege' on the Encore Action channel (for the 47th time this month). Despite being a joke of a movie, it held my interest in a gross kind of way. And it buried 'The New World.'

Make no mistake about it, this movie is appalling.

Yes, it has some haunting music, some beautiful scenery and one cannot fault the authenticity of recreating the period of history. The problem comes when you start looking around for a dialogue, a story, any excitement or any involvement in the proceedings.

There is an awful lot of people wistfully staring at each other, a lot of trees blowing in the wind, rivers, birds, spiders and, well, wildlife. It seems as if the director is waiting for a story to come to him, and in the mean-time, look at that flock of birds.

Another thing that strikes you, is the lack of a script. I think in the 2 1/2 excruciatingly boring hours of film, there must have been about 100 words said. Ethereal musings like "Who is he?" and "Where did he come from?" and pretensions like "What is life, Mother?" come drifting down from the screen. Meanwhile, from around the theatre I could hear moviegoers asking each other "What the hells going on?", "What are those birds doing?" and "shall we go?".

I am sorry to the other reviewers who have rated this film so highly, as I can see what they are saying to some extent. The problem I have is that to make the points that this film is ramming down our throats - about the destruction of innocence and good-nature vs. evil-"civilisation" - it does not need such a deadly passive storyline to do it.

I cannot help feeling that the director was doing everything he possibly could to stop the film being labelled as an "action" movie. He dampens every potentially good action scene so that it doesn't get too exciting. Even the few battles there are, are short-lived 'hand-bag' affairs where no one seems to get hurt - It's like watching "Pocahontas and the A-Team".

Unfortunately, in striking the balance between poignancy, style and story, he got it completely wrong. Movies like "Last of the Mohicans" have beautiful scenery, a love story, excellent action sequences, script and makes all the points this movie tries to in much less time.

I fell asleep in this movie. Granted I was quite tired, but this movie pushed me over the edge. I fell asleep at the bit where the girl meets King James until she is walking in the garden having been reunited with Cap'n Smith. I cannot imagine anything interesting happened in the time I was out and I am pretty sure I will never find out as I will not be revisiting this disastrously overrated movie.

The New World fmovies. "The New World" has an opening five minutes where Natives rush to the shore to get a view of the massive British ships that are about to land on what would become Jamestown that are every bit as fantastic as any of the scenes in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey". It's a perfect marriage of sound effects, music and visuals that literally paints itself onto the celluloid as a jaw dropping work of art. The nature of "discovery" and the power of film is boldly on display in Terrence Malick's brave "New World."

Some viewers will undoubtedly get lost in the visual and aural poetry, while others will be annoyed at the lack of a focused narrative and the sometimes sketchy character motives. This is a historical drama, and the amazing sets, costumes, and make-up attest to the wonderful attention to period detail, but there's also a dreamy surreal nature to the pacing that will lull some to sleep who were expecting a more traditional docudrama. This is more about the myth of Pocahantas and channeling ghosts than it is about the actual history behind the story. The dialog is as evasive and minimal as the visuals are overwhelming and painstaking. Plotting is secondary to the mood and meditations on love, discovery, curiosity, innocence, and the clashing of cultures.

Malick does a great job at showing the civilized and barbaric sides of both the Natives and the British. It's a wonderful testament to that first realization that there is intelligent life outside of one's own world. Central to this discovery of the "New World" is the romance between John Smith (a modest Colin Farrel) and Pocahantas (an amazing Q'Orianka Kilcher) which is displayed with just as much wide eyed-wonder and innocence as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Christian Bale as John Rolfe and Christopher Plummer as Captain Newport are also very good when they are allowed to act amongst the lush scenery. Composer James Horner, who is probably second only to John Williams in creating unforgettable movie music, outdoes himself as his rousing symphony (coupled with divine music from Wagner) perfectly matches the reverence and awe with which Malick uses his visuals to paint the myth on screen.

Some judicious editing may have benefited the middle portion of the film, which amounts to scene after beautiful scene of two people falling in love while worshiping nature, but there are two more series of scenes (one in the middle and one at the end) that are every bit as uplifting as the opening one and serve as a perfect synergy of visual and aural delights that completely transported this patient viewer to another realm. I'm not so sure that this is what it was really like to live in 1607, but I have no doubt this is what the people of that time dreamed about.

Malick's method is to frame films as remembrances. Remembrances of romantic notions, whether freedom, peace, war or love (as his four films trace). This way, he can exploit a languorous floating through remembered reality that never is that gentle or considered in actual reality. He can use his narration as things remembered, floating over the sights. To make this as effective as possible, he plays all sorts of tricks with the sound, having different boundaries of different types between what you see and hear.

Added to this is a considered approach to framing. You may have noticed that most filmmakers stage the action as if the world arranged itself to fit nicely in the window the camera sees. It makes for nice pictures and clear, precise drama, but we know it for what it is, a theatrical device. Malick is like Tarkovsky; he likes to discover things and if the way the world frames things so that they are off the window we see, so be it.

That's why his battle scenes are unique. With most directors, you'll have smiting and dying nicely so that we can see it. Or alternatively, we'll have point of view shots that are hectic as if we were a participant. These two battle scenes have the camera as a disembodied eye that shifts about as if it were the eye of dreams, or nearly lucid recalling or even retrospective invention. Sometimes hectic as if it were point of view, but never looking at what a combatant would, instead having a poetic avoidance.

I first met Malick when he was a lecturer at MIT and I a philosophy student. He spoke of French Objectivism, and was clearly bothered by how the notation and language constrained the ideas. At the time, I was doing my thesis on Thomas Harriot, who is the hidden motivator behind everything in this story — the real story. Malick never saw the thesis because by the time it was finished, he was off to explore this business of experiencing from the "outside" in cinematic language.

But Harriot is likely the inventor of the "external viewer of self" notions that Malick liked (as they reappeared in the French '60s) and uses in his philosophy of film. Harriot suggested he got it from the Chesapeake Indians. So the circle closes: a film about a people using their own mystical memory-visions.

If you take a little time to tune yourself to Malick's channel, you will find his work to be transcendent. I consider this one of the best films of 2005, despite its apparent commercial gloss and the mistaken notion that most will have that it is a love story. It is about remembering and inventing love in retrospect. A world is always new so long as the imagination of recall is supple.

+++++++++

The rest of this comment is of an historical nature. The love story is made up of course, but that's apt for a movie that is about invented memory. The Indians are mostly wrong, the body paint, hair and dress; according to the only document we have, the John White paintings, men and women were mostly nude even in winter and prided themselves on tolerance to the cold. There is no mention of the famous local hallucinogen, cypress puccoon which was widely traded and how a stone age people were able to survive in a land a hundred miles from the nearest stone.

(My original comment was deleted, presumably because there was a note about the unpeaceful nature of the people. Readers may want to consult good histories for that.)

Harriot (a scientist and mage) wintered over with a nearby "holy" tribe in

The New World

reviewed by Sam Osborn rating: 3.5 out of 4

Filing out of The New World, completely speechless and without notes, I could fathom only single adjectives to describe the experience. Looking at these listed words on my memo-pad now, they read "Thunderous, True, Beautiful, Solemn, Forceful, Gripping, Honest, and Slow." And for those who watch The New World with a calm countenance, an open mind and a ready cache of patience, Terrence Malick's long-awaited picture will have a similar effect. The film is a masterpiece thirty years in the making.

His goal is plain enough: to affectively and honestly portray the love Pocahontas experienced in those first years that Europeans cut their first, fresh swath from the New World. But Malick goes far beyond a simplistic love story. I was at the screening for Casanova a few days earlier, where the film's objective was essentially the same: to portray the love between Casanova and Francesca in the days of Inquisition Venice. But where Casanova approaches love at a bubbly, comedic perspective, The New World throws itself into a headlong narration of love's sorrow. Every frame of The New World reflects this painful, aching emotion, utilizing the sounds and images of environment to incredible, innovative effect. The first shot of the film--an extended shot several minutes in length--finds the camera staring into a river. It's clear and pristine, carefree and surrounded by the blissful sounds of an unperturbed forest. Soon ripples begin forming, and we notice the quiet droplets of rain pit-pattering around us, causing the water to flow a little, bringing about a contented onslaught of lily pedals. The scene continues on, drawing us farther and farther into Malick's deafening reality with only the sounds and images of nature. He creates a calm within us with these images, a kind of serene canvas for him to later paint the vivid brush-strokes of human love later in the film. In this entire first act, little is even said. But these scenes rarely grow tiring. He finds rich beauty with every situation. His forest is lush and his settlements picturesquely Dickensian. Malick shows great and rare confidence with this picture. Few filmmakers would have the cool audacity to create a film so primarily reliant on nothing being said.

The first and most important of Pocahontas' (Q'Orianka Kilcher) romances is with the infamous John Smith (Colin Farrell). He's brought to the New World bound in a cage, punished for earlier mutiny. But because he's the only soldier of the expedition, Captain Newport (Christopher Plummer) opts to let him free on a strict probation. Their first encounters with the Naturals, as they're called, go coolly enough, with curious interest from the Naturals and tense hesitation from the settlers. And even here Malick plays with flights of romantic whimsy. These scenes of first encounter are shot in windswept, overgrown grassy fields, with Pocahontas dancing and twirling about them with her brother, catching the spry interest of Smith.

Soon the settlers hear of a great city of Naturals down the river, and Smith is sent to investigate. Things have been going badly for the settlers and Captain Newport has left back for London and a new store of food and supplies. Smith's expedition is cut short, however, when he runs into a narrow, maze-like complex of swamps and is ambushed by warrior Naturals. He's taken prisoner by the Naturals, but granted life because of Pocahontas' curious i