Beautiful to look at, but self-indulgent, appalling script and direction

Rating: 1/10 (16 July 2007)

I wish I hadn't watched this film. Gorgeous cinematography but grossly flawed direction, dialogue and feel, with tedious sudden cuts to black, random bits of natural footage inserted, and a tendency to avoid having the speaker in shot. There's one classic moment where a woman is walking along the other side of the palisade from Pocahontas, who is walking at the same pace, listening. Exactly as the woman reached the end of the palisade her speech ended too. It reminded me of those scenes in nudist films where convenient props hide private parts. Here, the idea was to avoid the indecency of seeing actors actually speaking lines... It was almost as if they had had problems with lip-sync. Another thing that really got to me was the way that every boat or ship voyage, even across the Atlantic, was illustrated with... river footage. There were some classy actors in this film, but the direction didn't give them any help at all, apart from making them look superb. In fact I suspect casting was done largely on looks.