Yet another phony dredging up of "Pocahontas".

Rating: 1/10 (2 May 2007)

It's bad enough that Disney did a complete sanitizing of the John Smith - Pocohantas tale, including misrepresenting her as an adult so as to better palm the story off on kids. Now, we have "The New World" (DVD) which gives a romanticized account of Smith (Colin Farrel) as a smitten pedophile whose earnest devotion wins this child-woman (Q'orianka Kilcher) over after she bravely defies her father Smith's life. So, Hollywood still has as much trouble as ever in getting real about history. Fact is, Smith and Pocohantas were never more than good friends -- that business about sparing his life simply was ritual the Algonquin nation performed when they took prisoners. The rest of the movie similarly is cut from whole cloth, spinning a yarn that, actually, on top of being fictional is poorly directed and, accordingly, would have to go backward to move any more slowly. Quite sickeningly, it close on a smarmy, heart-warming note without even a mention at the closing credits of how Pocohantas, a young and still-flowering woman, met her end as a casualty of English "discovery" and "exploration" of a land its indigenous inhabitants already owned. Christopher Plummer and Christian Bale, as John Rolfe, the Englishman with whom she did get involved and eventually married (one of the few real events in this overdrawn, melodramatic fantasy) are gifted actors put to absolutely no good use. If you have to miss one film, make sure this it.