Terrible Waste of Time

Rating: 1/10 (21 January 2006)

My wife and I love movies. It is not unusual for us to see two per week in the theater. In this year of so many disappointing movies, we were anxiously awaiting The New World, which appeared to have much promise from its previews. Unfortunately, The New World proved not only disappointing, but downright terrible!
Someone needs to tell director Terrence Malick that beautiful photography alone does not make a movie! People were actually walking out half-way through this empty, insubstantial picture, which was more of a boring slide-show than a feature film! There was so little script that viewers had no way of knowing who any of the characters were, and there were only haphazard indications of the passage of time. Tragically, this effort fails completely as a historical piece, and you will learn more about the story by reading the film's synopsis than by seeing the over-wrought film itself.
Worse, to call this disjointed slide-show a "movie" borders on false advertising, and New Line Cinema has done a dreadful dis-service to movie-lovers by releasing this tripe. I would not be surprised if some slick lawyer decides to file a class-action lawsuit on the part of the misled audience.
This slide-show of a film was tedious, vague, ill-conceived, ill-executed, horribly directed and just boring! I will never again waste money on any film that Terrence Malick directs! Never!
Die-hard movie fans to the end, my wife and I stuck it out to the very last frame, and we regretted doing so. As we left the theater, all we heard from the other exiting audience members were criticism after criticism. And many were not as kind as this review!
Rarely has a gathering of such talented actors, production designers and photographers been so ill-served by a flimsy script, terrible directing and inane editing. Not to mention a music score that was so inappropriate at times that it elicited laughs from the audience during tragic scenes.
The only consolation is that word-of-mouth will surely get this picture out of theaters very quickly.