This embarrassing film is only for 1st year film-school fanboys.

Rating: 2/10 (28 June 2006)

Film-snobs of the worst kind, desperately grasping at straws in this "style over substance" piece of turd. That may seem harsh, but considering the ridiculous praise Terence Malick has gotten for his supposedly 'outstanding cinematography' on The New World, I don't feel like holding back any criticism. I hate this almost as much as I hate Crash (2004) and that's saying something.
The New World is unbearably slow, and I am not some movie-goer with the maximum attention span for a 90 minutes action feature. It was so slow you stopped being involved with the story. Talk about a director who had NO IDEA what he was doing, so he just stationed the camera, shot a few trees blowing in the wind, put it in his movie to compensate for the poor writing and called it 'art' - and immediately, geek fan-boys creamed their pants. I would have loved to see Malick explore the myth-laden new continent with adventures and culture contrasts, and instead got some pseudo-introspective nature special.
This film is simply not very good on any level. It is perhaps decent when it comes to acting, since even Colin Farrell managed to pull off a performance that wasn't all that bad. However, I am tired of Malick-fanboys claiming that he is some sort of "visual poet" and that The New World was full of deeper meaning that normal people "just cannot grasp". Malick is in fact highly amateurish in his visual approach and there is nothing original about the shots. He should do nature documentaries instead - because that is what the images look like, there's no 'oomph'. I appreciate visual directors with an edge and some originality to their style (Burton, Herzog, Green etc.) and I know one when I see one - and Malick isn't one. He either borrows or misuses styles.
What he does wrong is - he lets his story facilitate the pointless nature visuals, instead of letting the visuals facilitate his story (like David Gordon Green). He went with leaves blowing in the wind because it's a very safe thing to do and easily labelled 'art'. Is it any good? No, not really. It's a chicken-sh!t cop-out. There is nothing captivating about the film. Just molded and ready for film-geek worship. Lastly, I worry about anyone who can sit and listen to those horribly cheesy voice-overs for two hours and not laugh their ass off.
2/10