PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 12/28/05)

Love 'em or be frustrated by 'em, each new picture from director Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) should be irrefutably labeled an event, his latest being only his fourth feature in 32 years. But jolly good for him in taking his sweet time: Scene for radiant scene, shot for nary a wasted shot, The New World is the most artfully sculpted film in American cinema this year, for which the earth, wind and water are kneaded into an elemental tone poetry that shuns artificial lighting and contemporary allusion in favor of genuine, naturalistic mystique. Dreamily paced so there's always room to breathe, react and admire, the film (like every Malick project) will astonish some and make others fidgety, but to stand in the latter camp is to complain that a glorious sunrise is boring—or worse—anticlimactic.

A lush, unruly forest. James Horner's restlessly ambient score bleeds into a Wagner opera. It's 1607, and a hundred haughty English settlers have just arrived by ship to upset the Native Americans' ecosystem with their Jamestown colony startup. The mutinous Captain John Smith (Colin Farrell, quite fine as a sorrow-eyed swashbuckler) is let loose from his chains on his own recognizance, then put in charge after his peers return to the old world for supplies. After a skirmish with the Powhatan tribe deep within the Edenic woods, Smith soon finds himself living and learning with the "naturals," while wooing the spirited teenage princess Pocahontas (fairly newcomer Q'Orianka Kilcher, stitching this whole tapestry together). Her curious idealism and his dog-eared realism somehow meld into an impossible love that is pure romanticism, but whether the revisionism runs rampant here is for scholars to argue, not film buffs, as the point isn't the history but the experience and emotional rush. One can't argue with the elegiac power of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who vitalizes their affair with pensive tracking shots through windblown fields, a camera's luminous dance of the wood nymphs.

The seasons subtly change when Smith returns to Jamestown, but the societal contrast is bleakly enormous; the settlement has been devastated by a plague of greed and materialism that the Indians have never known. Malick chooses the colonists' desperation as the springboard into imperialism striking back, leading to a brutally hopeless clash between the cultures that contemplates eye-for-an-eye futility more potently than Spielberg's Munich. Too much of a strain on their courtship, Smith leaves his lover behind in search of passage through the Indies, and the young princess becomes uncomfortably acclimated with a civilization more complex and hostile than her own. When aristocrat John Rolfe (Christian Bale, a welcome last-act addition) enters the scene and sweeps Pocahontas off her once-bare feet before she has a chance to sort out her feelings, the film's precise straightforwardness still surprises us with a whole new world (in this case, England) of narrative thread, depth and meaning. Rumor has it that Malick plans to shave another 20 minutes off the film before its wide release in January, but even if the critics get ornery over his inexhaustible supply of internal monologues and long stretches of no dialogue at all, cutting anything from this masterful, magical breathtaker would not just be a mistake, but a criminal compromise.—Aaron Hillis