Flowing tone poem with choppy editing.

Rating: 7/10 (4 February 2006)

First of all, I like long historical movies. If they are well done, as "The New World" was meant to be, I feel that I am actually living in the Indian village up river or in colonial Jamestown. It is a long movie, as many have noted already, and it not for everyone's taste. However, what made it uncomfortably long for me and what ultimately irritated me was the horrible hack job done by the editor to get it ready for prime time. The editor could and should have cut some of the repetitive love scenes -- we get the idea. But there was so much jumping around between incidents with no explanation about how and why things were happening that I had to turn to my history book to make the connections that should have been in the film, and probably were before it was released. Such a great deal of painstaking effort went into the making of "The New World" that I wish the pieces could be put back together so that it could flow as the river.