Con-job, not Art

Rating: 4/10 (3 January 2007)

If you are not a devotee of Malick, don't waste your time on this one. You won't get it and you won't like it. If you liked that other con-job of Malick's, "The Thin Red Line," which was admittedly better than this film (but that's not saying much), you'll want to like this one, because it's more of the trite crap that passes for high-art cinema these days.
If, as I do, you genuinely like artistic, metaphorical movies such as those made by Bergman, Fellini, and Godard then I think you will be mightily disappointed by this pretender. The problem, I think, is that Malick tries to straddle two worlds of cinema, believing he can bring high-art to the average movie-watcher, or action-drama to the avant-garde, and he fails at both. If the soldiers in "The Thin Red Line" weren't a bunch of mournful, whussy poets, he might have had a decent war film, or if he had put his warrior-poets on a metaphorical battlefield using experimental staging techniques, like Lars Von Trier, he might have made a good art-film.
As with the English colonists & the Native Americans in "The New World," the two cinema cultures do not mix. The whispered, prosaic narratives by Smith (most wrongfully played by Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher) are trite, uninteresting, and only serve interrupt the flow of the story, where the action & dialogue were doing a sufficient job.
The only reason this film was nominated for anything was because the nasty old men of Hollywood just wanted to see Q'Orianka Kilcher at the award ceremonies in a tight, designer dress. Note almost all nominations were for her.
Admittedly, the cinematography was outstanding, and the camera-work in the battle scenes truly enhanced the feeling of being in a disorganized melee, but that's just not enough to support a dreadfully boring and otherwise false film.