Incoherent Art

Rating: 2/10 (5 August 2006)

While I applaud the historical authenticity of the film - the situations, sets, costumes, language & cultural characterizations were excellent - I found it to be an incoherent mess which started out chaotically and by mid-film, had become very slow, completely boring & pointless.
After a brief promising start (and excellent work by Christopher Plummer), the film starts jumping all over the place with no sense of time or space. If this was an attempt at conveying the chaos & uncertainty of a strange situation in a strange land, it succeeded, but it was, in my opinion, lousy storytelling. Looked like the editor was on PCP. Or something.
While it was interesting to hear the native dialog in the proper tongue, after Smith learns the language and could presumably understand them, it would have been nice if we've been treated the same. Subtitling, while appropriately absent at first, should have been used more often later. Often, it was just too difficult to tell what was going on. And it's not very interesting to hear long exchanges of dialog when the actions give you no clue as to what's happening.
Colin Farrell was wasted. He spent 90% of the film with one expression on his face - looking very worried. One gets the impression that director Terrence Malick said, "look very worried, Colin", and left it at that. In the first 30 minutes of the film, he had perhaps 8 lines of dialog. In fact, in the rest of the film, he didn't say much more.
Q'Orianka Kilcher was a joy to behold, and conveyed innocence, vulnerability & childish playfulness beautifully, but how many times can you watch her gesticulating at the sun & walking through fields? Malick apparently couldn't get enough of it.
The portrayal of the military actions was laughable. As a 17th century historical re-enactor, I was cheered when I saw them form up with pike & musket (if somewhat shambolically) to face the "naturals" outside the fort. But after presenting a wall of pikes, and sending one line of musketeers forwards to fire (with none in reserve for the second volley - which is basic stuff in this era), instead of getting the musketeers to retire & reload whilst the pikes covered the front, for some reason everyone suddenly ran forward in all directions, and got done over as they deserved to do for being so stupid. For Pete's sake! If you're going to run all over the place, it defeats the purpose of having a formation in the first place. Duh.
I guess I'm not a fan of Malick's films. I thought The Thin Red Line one of the worst war (or war-setting) films I have ever seen. In that one, we had similar military nonsense - the Japanese, deadly crack shots who never miss at a distance of 2 miles, apparently cannot hit a single one of dozens of Americans running at them from 30 yards away. Maybe they weren't trained that way. When there was no shooting, everyone just whined.
But back to The New World. It may be art (it's obviously intended to be, since it's not entertainment), and it's certainly a film, but it doesn't do a good job of telling a story.