Who would have guessed that colonizing the New World could have been this boring?

Rating: 1/10 (31 May 2006)

Dreadful. That is the best word I can use to describe this film. It starts out slow...and then tapers off. This subject had all the makings of a great story: flight from European oppression, venturing into the Unknown, internal conflicts, struggle for survival, battles with the indigenous peoples, romance. All of these things should lend themselves to an interesting and engaging movie. Instead, we get over two hours of a beautifully filmed, but self-indulgent, preachy, meandering, and ultimately boring work. There is little dialogue, with most of the characters preferring to monologue (almost inaudibly) and/or pray as they wander through the forest. There is even less action, with the few battle scenes and occasional power struggles (between John Smith and those who would usurp his command) having little buildup and being over quickly, which is about the only thing in this tedious movie that does happen quickly. You would expect that a film about the men who first tried to colonize Virginia to be exciting or at the very least interesting, but it's a 135-minute marathon to see whether you can stay awake and resist the urge to fast-forward through the obviously overdone and drawn out scenery shots. Also, you'll spend a lot of time turning up the volume to hear the self-important and pretentious voice-overs, of which there are many.
There are two, and only two, good things about this movie. The first is Q'Orianka Kilcher, who plays Pocahontas. She's beautiful, and seems a very promising young actress, even if Malick did have her wandering around and mumbling for most of the movie. The other is the filming, which is very picturesque and authentic. (I visited the Jamestown settlement in Virginia, and the film, shot in natural light on a nearby river in Virginia, looks identical.) But even at that, we are forced to sit through shots and sequences that easily take 3-4 times as long as is necessary to get the point across. For some reason, 45 seconds or more after it is blindingly apparent that Pocahantas is "whimsical" or that Smith is "sad", we're still watching her skipping through the forest or him standing alone in a field (and mumbling his monologue, of course).
Each of the elements that should make this an excellent film is somehow wasted. The struggle for survival, with men in the fort boiling their own belts to eat the leather, becomes laughable when the Powhatans bring deer and other game to help the colony. Why didn't they just go out and hunt for themselves? For a colony struggling to survive, whose crops are failing, without enough food, at war with the Natives in a strange land, with shaky leadership and little support from England...the characters in this movie spend an awful lot of time just walking, at an excruciatingly slow pace, around the compound and talking to each other (or, more frequently, to themselves). Shouldn't they be working at something? Shouldn't someone in this film be in some kind of hurry? And as for romance, how could any woman feel romantic toward Farrell's character, who never looks anything but forlorn throughout the entire movie? How could any man identify with him or want him to succeed in leading these people, when he seems so dispassionate and distracted for so much of the film? This movie could have been to the Jamestown settlement what Dances With Wolves was to the Old West. That movie was also beautifully filmed, and didn't over-simplify the roles of heroes and villains, but kept the story moving. Even with a plodding actor like Costner, numerous voice-overs and three hours or more to watch, you stayed glued to your seat. The only thing keeping you in your seat through The New World is gravity, and that becomes less compelling as this dud of a film drags on and on and on...
I tell you, if the "new world" was really as boring as The New World, it's amazing anyone else ever came across The Pond.