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Moviola > Films > The New World
The New World (12A) 135 mins"Once discovered, it was changed forever." Terrence Malick has made very few films, but they are always beautiful. This one is visually stunning. It tells the well-known story of the English adventurers arriving in Virginia in the 17th century in search of gold, and how John Smith (Colin Farrell) was saved from death at the hands of the Powhatans by the intervention of Pocahontas, played by the exquisite 14-year-old newcomer Q’Orianka Kilcher. The film brilliantly conveys the strangeness, wonder and menace of this new world where everything is utterly unfamiliar, fascinating and potentially hostile, and the precariousness of life there for the new arrivals. But there are also dangers within their own group: John Smith sets foot in the new world under sentence of hanging for insubordination, and as starvation threatens mutiny is never far from the surface. In contrast, Smith perceives the natives, or “naturals”, as “gentle, loving, faithful, lacking in all guile and trickery. The words denoting lying, deceit, greed, envy, slander, and forgiveness have never been heard.” Smith and Pocahontas fall in love, but he is recalled by James l to lead an expedition elsewhere. Cast out by her people for having helped the English, she is baptized with an English name, marries John Rolfe (Christian Bale), and goes with him to England to be presented at court, herself experiencing the discovery of a new world. “The New World is a profound, revealing, wonderful film about the meeting of two cultures and the shaping of a new one. And it has a feeling of rare authenticity in its mood, language and treatment of Native American life.” Philip French "In Mr Malick's telling, Pocahontas is a woman whose story has the reach of myth and the tragic dimension of life." The New York Times
Last modified: 20-Jun-2008 |
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