Good movie, but could have been much better.

Rating: 6/10 (6 December 2005)

I saw this movie at an advanced showing at the U.N. building as part of their monthly program of choosing a U.N. member film to show to students.
The movie, overall, was much more historically accurate than the Disney production of the Pocahontas animated film, was less flowing. The flashbacks and scene changes are choppy. The silent pauses, though meaningful, get very tiresome when they have been used between Pocahontas, Captain Smith, and John Rolfe for about, literally, the twentieth or thirtieth time. I'm not sure if it's a reflection that the Native Americans weren't disposed to verbal conversation, or verbal conversation was not common between Native Americans and whites, but it weighed down the movie and slowed its pace, making for a bored audience.
Unless there are closed captions, those who are not used to British accents may find it hard to catch lines when they are spoken quickly and/or sound distorted. Subtitles are lacking, although it may have been intentional to show how clueless the white settlers were in dealing with the Native American language.
Q'Orianka Kilcher, who along with another actor who played the part of one of the Native American warriors, was available for a Q&A session after the movie, did a superb acting job for her age and relative experience. The casting was pretty well done, as far as I could tell, but the script didn't do the movie justice.