Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

From my favorite movies..

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

My take on this movie is mixed. I loved the story of the movie, the sets, and the cinematography. However, i am not satisfied of the presentation of the move and the way the plot was presented and sometimes the scenes got confusing. Also i am not happy with Will Farrel's acting. Christian bale was classic as usuall. By the way, this is my first review ever, so i might be a bit off on some points.

The story of the English exploration of Virginia, and of the changing world and loves of Pocahontas.There are, of course, historical issues with this film. Most scholars agree that there was no romantic relationship between Pocahontas and Smith. She would have been 10 years old in 1608 when they were said to have first met. So the whole premise is flawed. But in other areas, such as the attempt to have a native language spoken, some credit ought to be given.Ultimately, I found the film to be good but somewhat trying. Malick is a strange director. Obviously talented, but he lets his artistic vision go unchecked. And then it starts feeling pretentious. Other directors could be accused of similar issues (David Lynch?), and I suppose it really comes down to artistic preference. My preference does not jibe with Malick, it seems.

This film started with some whispered voice-over, continued with mumbled voice-over and never stopped with mumbling and whispering... There where some beautiful shots of landscape. And for sure Q'orianka Kilcher is totally sweet, but all this is drowned in mumbling, whispering and waggonloads of chliché.You have to listen to sentences like "Who is she?" or "Who is he?" about 12.000 times because the actors are not speaking but continuously thinking trite bullshit.The native Americans are called (very p.c.!) naturals, not savages, like the first settlers probably would have done, and they are depicted as real childlike and naive "noble savages".Pocahontas is so deeply natural, constantly talking to her mother (nature!), so completely in balance with her environment that you get sick of it. And she is so holy and pure that she purifies the soul of every men falling in love with her.And civilization is completely evil and destructive. John Smith is turned into a martyr because he realizes that he is responsible for the corruption of the pure and innocent soul of America, instead of realizing that he just behaves like a stupid asshole. But the script turns his letting-her-down into a saving-her-from-evil. Yak! The music is terrible. It does not fit the time, the scenes or whatsoever.There are dozens of highly illogical scenes that just do break the continuity. Once Pocahontas is at the coast, than she is hundreds of miles upstream, in one scene the settlers and Indians are killing each other, in the next they are just staring at each other with no visible victims of the former battle, in one scene the Indians take Georgetown, burn it to the ground and kill the inhabitants, in den next the Indians are again outside the palisades, the people of Georgetown are still alive and are on the watch and so on...And when Smith finally returns to England and visits Pocahontas, now called Rebecca, he still is dressed like coming straight out of the wilderness with greasy, filthy hair and ragged leather clothe...Why 3 stars instead of 1? Just because of Q'orianka Kilcher and Christian Beale. And the fact that she finally turns down the really annoying Collin Farell who just looks like a beaten dog throughout more than 2 hours...

Terrence Malik is a very strange director. That statement can be taken two ways, both of them applicable to this clunky effort. From the start the film utilises similar techniques and ideas found in "The Thin Red Line" - in fact ever since "Badlands". We hear the thoughts of characters as they reflect on the paradoxes of life'n'lurve'n'conflict. There's a lot of Noble Savage guff going on here and more than a hint of "Last of the Mohicans" - not in a Good Way. I'm reluctant to call any of his movies pretentious because at his best no director manages better to incorporate into his films profound ideas about what it is to be a human being. The Thin Red Line is something of a masterpiece in this respect. It amazes me that he can have so misjudged the pace of the film. All that said the young lead actress is quite magnificent in the role, almost - almost - making it worth enduring the excruciating longueurs which drag the film down over and over again. There are some irritatingly implausible quirks about the way the dialogue is handled too. The perennially difficult issue of how to deal with two languages where neither group can speak or understand the other is incompetently executed. "Slow" in itself seldom bothers me if the content works, but this is a really tedious clunker. I lost interest just over 90 minutes in.