A dendrophile's wet dream... lots of trees, little else

Rating: 3/10 (22 March 2007)

Terrence Malick comes out of a 7-year retirement to deliver this epic story of the romance between Pocahontas and John Smith, in a movie which features gorgeous photography and... what else? The story is certainly not interesting, the film is as pretentious as they come yet seems to have little to say, and Colin Farrell is about as charismatic as a toned-down Keanu Reeves in the main role. The film is a seemingly endless blend of shots of trees, shots of water, shots of the Virginia forest, shots of more water, shots of more trees, shots of more Virginian forest, and hundreds of Meaningful Glances(TM) between Farrell and Pocahontas (played by newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher, seemingly the only part of the cast who isn't a living dead), and pretentious pseudo-philosophical voiceovers.
The film moves at a snail's pace and although I started out enjoying the music and images I ended up hating the film and how empty, pointless and repetitive it was. There's no chemistry between Smith and Pocahontas and the whole film is plagued by a dry, dull feeling. Even the short action scene somewhere towards the middle of the film is dull, as you're too detached from the characters and story to actually care. Not only does he make two hours feel like five, Malick also completely wastes the enormous talent of the cast. Christian Bale has maybe 20 minutes of actual screen time to develop his character and his dialogue is as tediously would be-philosophical as Farrell's and Kilcher's. Christopher Plummer and David Thewlis drop by to say maybe six or seven lines total and then disappear without making any impression. This is one of those films that you will either get or not, and the atmosphere which Malick tried to create didn't work for me at all. It is still an original movie in many ways, but a failure in my opinion. You will either love this or hate it. I know many people saw atmospheric genius where I saw dull, pretentious waste of film, so I can't safely say that you will hate it. It's a very personal matter, I guess.
Or maybe I'm just too hopelessly plebian to "understand" the great vision of Malick. I should note that I have nothing at all against long and/or slow movies - films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Godfather and Lost in Translation actually have some *substance* to them instead of thousands of shots of high grass - but this was just too much and too empty. Yawn.