Rambling, incoherent and ineffectual - until Bale shows up.

Rating: 4/10 (22 January 2006)

Terence Malick can sing with all the voices of the mountain, he can't paint with all the colors of the wind, but he can't put together a cohesive narrative. He is a visual artist, and a poet, but these skills do not compliment each other in "The New World", a pretentious, disjointed mess. Remember the awkward scene in the first "Superman" film where we hear Lois Lane's thoughts in a cheesy pseudo-poetic voice-over? Now imagine if that scene were tow and a half hours long. It's no surprise that it took four editors and multiple cuts to get this film in theaters - it plays as if the editors never talked to each other an assembled the film at random.
The saving grace is Christian Bale. Batman arrives in the nick of time to provide the film with a compelling fully realized character that actually manages to make the film touching at the end, but it's a long wait to get there.