Painfully awful

Rating: 1/10 (13 August 2006)

I had high expectation for this film as I am generally a fan of historical films and costume dramas. I found the pace of the film ridiculously slow with little or no dialogue or narration to point out what the hell was going on. Incredibly beautiful nature scenes depicting an 'unspoiled' North American paradise with little or no human action go on for long, uninterrupted spaces of time. Dialog, or what passes for it in this movie, consists of long-sequences of character narration that describes what is going on and what they feel about it. This is appropriate in a novel, but in a movie extensive use of narration is more a crutch signaling a weak script, poor direction, or mediocre acting -- often all three.
The acting in this film was also rather weak, principally because the characters seemed so lost in off screen narration that their on-screen performance seem mechanical and unnatural. Colin Farrell and Q'orianka Kilcher had absolutely no on-screen chemistry.
In short, this is a film that glorifies and emphasizes the natural world the characters find themselves rather than what the characters are saying or doing to each other.