Not a film

Rating: 2/10 (8 May 2006)

I decided to chance it one day and go see "The New World" because it had one of my most respected actors in it (Colin Farrel and Christopher Plummer) and it looked quite good, since there were very few realistic colonial-era movies of the subject.
What I saw in the theater was not a film.
It felt like a pretentious art student's college film trying so hard to be blasé and chic and all those fancy crazy words with obscure meanings that scream "creative" and fumbles like a giant tumbling off a cliff.
First off, the sparse dialogue. There's hardly much dialogue in any scene minus a few lines spoken by a character off-camera or for a few shots on camera. If all the dialogue were put together and single-spaced, it'd take up at most five pages of the script. The sparse dialogue isn't even memorable or deeply moving! It's just blandly stating the obvious like "we're here in the new world." "the natives are savages" "it's been three days." So where does most of the movie go if there's virtually no dialogue? Cinematography. I rate this two stars only because it looked authentic. The vast majority of the camera and film was devoted to cinematography and just filming trees and grass swaying in the wind and birds and indians frolicking like playful little things.
The young new actress playing Pocahantas (who isn't even named in the film, we just assume she's Pocahantas) is really uneventful and unfulfilling, and a bore to look at. At least Colin Farrel tries hard in his role, whereas Christopher Plummer doesn't look too anxious and seems glad to be rid of himself by the middle of the movie.
The latter half takes place in England, where Pocahantas ends up with another colonist. It's equally silent there dialogue-wise, and very uneventful save for a silent meeting with the King and Queen and a frolic through the vast maze gardens of the palace's backyard.
So in total, the movie consisted of Pocahantas frolicking, and some scenes with the white men and indians looking concerned and the occasional spoken word or gunfire. But mostly frolicking.