The New World ****

Writer/Director: Terrence Malick

Year: 2005

Cinematographer: Emmanuel Lubezki

Malick's dream of John Smith's awesome experience discovering "the new world" and Pocahontas' awesome experience discovering what to her was a new world, though we call it the old world. Time, plot, explanation for events all get lost in Malick's dream. It builds upon his work in The Thin Red Line, which was nearly as confusing for those trying to follow a series of events, and focused more on a kind of journal reading of different characters meditations on war, but here, while keeping John Smith, Pocahontas and John Rolfe's emotional journals, the plot is even more lost. It feels other worldly, like the dreams they must have felt they were living.

If you want to see a historic recreation of events, don't look to a Malick film... if you want to feel what they felt emotionally, if you want to see what the new world must have looked like to their eyes, then this is a beautiful film, that almost seems like the dreams of the memories of the central characters perhaps being recalled at the end of their lives.