heart breaking

Rating: 9/10 (21 August 2012)

I was worried that The New World would be a Disnified tale. It was not. It was something quite unlike anything I had seen before. It tells its story mostly visually, with some natural sounds and with a soaring soundtrack in the classical style.
It does not explain. It leaves everything you see just as mysterious as it was for the colonists.
Though there are terrible battles, it is not one of those stupid shoot-em-ups where you are supposed to presume all virtue lies with one side and all wickedness the other.
The ghastliness of living in a fledgling colony is nightmarish. Not only do you deal with contaminated food, starvation, freezing, lack of water, you deal with religious and superstitious lunatics, racists, despotic power crazed loons, torture and people with gold fever who can't think of anything else.
Q'orianka Kilcher who plays Pocahontas looks much like Olivia Hussey who played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet. She has captivating body language, but does not look like a "natural", what the English colonists call the aboriginal people.
There is not that much humour. The one scene that made me laugh was a native exploring an English formal garden and being utterly baffled by the symmetrical shapes of the topiary.
There is a lot of heartache in this movie, balanced by the joy of an untrammelled natural world. It was a bit too intense for me.