BOOOOOOORIIIING...
This film is boring for a number of reasons.
Reason 1: Terrence Malick seems to think that continuously and at great length pointing his camera at the wind blowing through the treetops while playing tranquil birdsong is enough to create great art. Apparenty, to move beyond just 'great' and into the realm of shorts-sprayingly 'sublime' art, he also thinks that all you need to do is play a load of irritatingly cryptic yet utterly vacuous adolescent poetry as an interior monolgue over and over again. Overdone and self-consciously 'artilly' stylised, it just comes accross as angsty sixth-form bullshit.
Reason 2: The whole organising idea of the film is horribly cliched and politically vacuous. Since the first white europeans stepped into the first 'virgin' shore of the first soon-to-be-colonised 'terra nullius' stories and myths have been written that figure western exploration/colonisation of other people's far off lands in terms of sexual conquest. I'm not even talking about how sexual violence has always been a tool of colonisation here, what I mean is that if you look at the writings of colonisers, and writing about colonisers back in the homeland, the metaphor of the coloniser as big strong thrusting male explorer taming the strange foreign land as an exotic and erotic native woman is never far away.
Now the Pocahontas story, of which this film is a retelling, is just one example of this type of story among many. And 'The New World' does nothing to alter/play with/subvert the old cliche at all. The violent conquest of America is almost wholly played out through the metaphor of the sexual conquest and ultimate domestication and domination of the native american woman.
First you've got the initial Golden Age of brooding and gorgeous Captain Smith (Colin Farrell) wooing the equally lovely Pocahontas (although she's never named as such in the film) in the wild and beautiful woods of Virginia (the dialogue continually hammers home the fact we're supposed to see their relationship as a metaphor for the wider colonisation of the future US of A: Colin (manly and smouldering) 'You are my America', Pocahontas: (simpering) 'Now you own me'). Then, after he's buggered off and left her on a self-aggrandising mission to become a famous explorer, we see the heartbroken squaw, now booted out of her tribe, wooed and won by a jolly nice English type who gets her to work on his tobacco plantation (Pocahontas starts British American Tobaccco?!), marries her, turns her into a sad parody of an 'English Lady', has a kid, and takes her to England to be displyed before the King, and mends her heart, then she promptly dies before she can see her homeland again. Inbetween we get many more treetop shots, plenty of birdsong, and a few more idiotic interior monologues.
In fact, it's not just boring, it's downright bad.
Not only is much of a sense for the very real violence and degradation inflicted on the original american people by the colonisers totally elided, but the whole grubby and incredibly nasty affair of conquest is displayed for us through the lens of a soft focus love-story. At a time when rampant American imperial aggression is causing so many problems in the world, this film about the birth of America (what else is a film called 'The New World' supposed to be about?) had the potential to ask some interesting questions and display some uncomfortable truths about the nature of colonialism and imperialism. It totally fails to do so, and that's just unforgivable.
Some will say it's a triumph of style over substance, but even the style is shite in this one.
This film is boring for a number of reasons.
Reason 1: Terrence Malick seems to think that continuously and at great length pointing his camera at the wind blowing through the treetops while playing tranquil birdsong is enough to create great art. Apparenty, to move beyond just 'great' and into the realm of shorts-sprayingly 'sublime' art, he also thinks that all you need to do is play a load of irritatingly cryptic yet utterly vacuous adolescent poetry as an interior monolgue over and over again. Overdone and self-consciously 'artilly' stylised, it just comes accross as angsty sixth-form bullshit.
Reason 2: The whole organising idea of the film is horribly cliched and politically vacuous. Since the first white europeans stepped into the first 'virgin' shore of the first soon-to-be-colonised 'terra nullius' stories and myths have been written that figure western exploration/colonisation of other people's far off lands in terms of sexual conquest. I'm not even talking about how sexual violence has always been a tool of colonisation here, what I mean is that if you look at the writings of colonisers, and writing about colonisers back in the homeland, the metaphor of the coloniser as big strong thrusting male explorer taming the strange foreign land as an exotic and erotic native woman is never far away.
Now the Pocahontas story, of which this film is a retelling, is just one example of this type of story among many. And 'The New World' does nothing to alter/play with/subvert the old cliche at all. The violent conquest of America is almost wholly played out through the metaphor of the sexual conquest and ultimate domestication and domination of the native american woman.
First you've got the initial Golden Age of brooding and gorgeous Captain Smith (Colin Farrell) wooing the equally lovely Pocahontas (although she's never named as such in the film) in the wild and beautiful woods of Virginia (the dialogue continually hammers home the fact we're supposed to see their relationship as a metaphor for the wider colonisation of the future US of A: Colin (manly and smouldering) 'You are my America', Pocahontas: (simpering) 'Now you own me'). Then, after he's buggered off and left her on a self-aggrandising mission to become a famous explorer, we see the heartbroken squaw, now booted out of her tribe, wooed and won by a jolly nice English type who gets her to work on his tobacco plantation (Pocahontas starts British American Tobaccco?!), marries her, turns her into a sad parody of an 'English Lady', has a kid, and takes her to England to be displyed before the King, and mends her heart, then she promptly dies before she can see her homeland again. Inbetween we get many more treetop shots, plenty of birdsong, and a few more idiotic interior monologues.
In fact, it's not just boring, it's downright bad.
Not only is much of a sense for the very real violence and degradation inflicted on the original american people by the colonisers totally elided, but the whole grubby and incredibly nasty affair of conquest is displayed for us through the lens of a soft focus love-story. At a time when rampant American imperial aggression is causing so many problems in the world, this film about the birth of America (what else is a film called 'The New World' supposed to be about?) had the potential to ask some interesting questions and display some uncomfortable truths about the nature of colonialism and imperialism. It totally fails to do so, and that's just unforgivable.
Some will say it's a triumph of style over substance, but even the style is shite in this one.
