The New World

The New World

Scott Manning
January 22, 2006 | Comments (2)

Director: Terrence Malick
Release Date: January 13th, 2006
Rating: PG-13 (for some intense battle sequences)
See it on Amazon

It's not that hard to make a movie that is entertaining. People make movies with handheld camcorders that can hold my attention.

Terrence Malick was given top-notch actors, 30 million bucks, and one of the greatest stories from the past 500 years. He put all that together to direct one of the most atrocious movies I have ever been stupid enough to sit through.

The New World wasn't as bad as Master of Disguise, but it wasn't as good as Pumpkin Head 2.

The story of Pocahontas was butchered before back in the early 90's by Disney. They made her into a singing, environmentalist and thus a political statement. Terrence Malick obviously set out with the goal of outdoing Disney.

It's hard to say this is a crappy movie. A movie usually has key things like a plot. The New World is two and a half hours of choppy montages to the tune of slowly read poems. The poems are reminiscent of The Thin Red Line (another Malick film), only worse.

"I love her." Pause for five seconds. "She loves me." Pause for five seconds. "We are in love." Meanwhile montages are showing two people staring at each other, an eagle flying through the air, and random Indian kids chasing each other.

The chopping is unbearable. Serious effort must be put forth by the viewer to figure out what is flashback, a dream sequence, and what is currently happening in the "storyline". Scenes are just strung together with no clear transition.

This goes on for two and a half hours.

Don't get me wrong. There is some dialogue, but it's only filler until we get to the next slow, choppy montage. Montages are supposed to be filler between storyline, not the other way around.

But let's not forget the beautiful scenery of pre-white America and the authentic costumes. The scenery is freaking Virginia and costumes stopped being impressive over a decade ago.

There is one battle scene, if you can even call it that. Some Indians and some Englishmen toss each other around while the cameraman turns away from every instance of contact. There is no blood and the fakeness is prevalent.

The "Colin Farrell" look
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Colin Farrell didn't let me down though. He managed to keep that same damned look he's had in every movie he's ever acted. Just picture an emotional kid was told that his favorite gerbil had committed suicide by jumping in a garbage disposal.

That's the "Colin Farrell" look.

Pocahontas be damned
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I've read about the real Pocahontas. Her story is fascinating and tragic, but no one would realize that from this movie. All key points and dramatic situations are lost in the montages or just ignored completely.

This movie strikes no passion or emotion. It's boring. There is no attachment to the characters.

Having sat through two and half hours of this piece of crap has made me realize that a movie about two queer cowboys making out might be tolerable.

Related links
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The New World (Official website)
The New World box office stats

As of January 22, 2006, the movie had grossed 1.2 million. I hope that the movie tanks and Malick writes a poem about his latest failure.

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Comments (2):

1) Posted by: Natalie Ells
January 31, 2006 7:04 PM

Both films dragging on scenes of nature and missing a storyline completely. Horrible they are both two and a half hours of bad music bad cinematography and minimal dialog, there is not a single memorable scene in either film and I considered removing my eyeballs during both of them. To be fair Brokeback Mountain has a story it is not about being gay its about infidelity. And The new world is about the colors green and brown that is all I remember of the entire two and half hours of snip-its of a movie it was almost as though they filmed several different scenes and forgot the order and just fed it to us for $9.00, I would have never known that it was about Pocahontas If I didn’t see the synopsis (follows)…
Colin Farrell plays the adventurous John Smith, who fought in Hungary and endured slavery in Turkey before sailing to America to pursue his destiny there. When this historical drama by Terrence Malick ('Badlands,' 'The Thin Red Line') begins, it is 1607; Smith is 27 years old and one of a group of British colonists hoping to establish a permanent settlement at Jamestown, Va., an uncharted spot on the edge of the New World. At first, Smith's fate doesn't seem promising, as he's been locked up in the brig for insubordination and is awaiting execution once the ship reaches shore. But in this unpredictable wilderness, every able-bodied man is needed, and so the charismatic Smith is set free. While exploring the lands beyond the settlement, he meets the headstrong and beautiful Pocahontas (newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher), daughter of the powerful Chief Powhatan (August Schellenberg), who governs the land that the colonists are determined to tame. As the relationship between Smith and Pocahontas -- two passionate, fiercely independent people bound by duty, yet also to each other -- deepens, they must survive an attempt on Smith's life, Pocahontas' marriage to another man, and a looming conflict in which the triumph of one culture entails the sacrifice of another. The movie, which features gorgeous cinematography and meticulous attention to historical detail, also stars Christopher Plummer as Captain Christopher Newport and Christian Bale as John Rolfe.

2) Posted by: Maurice Reeves
April 10, 2006 3:49 PM

I know that some people love Colin Farrell, but really, his greatest ability is to destroy any movie he appears in, to make it almost unwatchable.

Same could be said of Terrence Malik, who, in Thin Red Line, built a monument to his intelligence...so the combination of the two of them at once immediately made me feel that this movie would be a blackhole of quality from which nothing watchable would escape.

And I say this as a guy who liked "The English Patient" and "Magnolia", so it's not like I'm adverse to obtuse movies.

I'm happy to see that my initial reaction to "The New World" was correct: steaming pile of crap.