Ummm, like you know, it was fucking INCREDIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(will discuss it more in detail later)

I thought the film was pants, especially the first half. The scenes and dialogues were cringe-worthy and embarrassing. The film only picked up during the second half when it returns to England. I am a big Terrence Malick fan, I consider him one of the best contemporary filmmakers around. Yet god knows what happened with this film, it really was a major disappointment for me. The film does contains wonderful cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki.

I'm in total agreement, DC.

I'm too scared to write anything about it until I see it again. But damn, I was quite near tears during the final moments of the film. Q'Orianka Kilcher for Oscar!

(SPOILERS)
In "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures" documentary, Scorsese addressed Kubrick's rather sparse output by stating that one Kubrick film is essentially like 5 or so films from almost any other director. I think the same is certainly true of Terrence Malick.

I've seen The New World twice now, initially I felt it would be unjust to do any write-up for a film the needs more importantly to be experienced than anything else. To drop one's draw and gasp hopelessly for breath for the two hours or so is the feeling I get the two times I've seen it on the Big Screen. It's rare to find a film soo moving on aesthetic, narrative, emotional and philosophical levels. The New World is a brilliant film that works wonderfully on all levels. A masterpiece that will spark discussions for many ages to come and collectively, it also adds an argument to Malicks ontological thesis. A film that is a work of exquisite visual beauty. And, indeed, no argument there. It's certainly the most captivating, ethereal-looking movie since Malick's previous The Thin Red Line; the use of Wagner & Mozart scores is gorgeously evocative. As with all of Malick's work, the use of voiceovers in the film similarly contribute to the construction of character, synthesizing impersonal chronicle with stream-of-consciousness poetics. These contemplations are delivered with real, direct conviction, and they are not counterpointed by action or images, as the voiceovers in Days of Heaven or Badlands are. At the end of The New World, as we're hearing the lifeless voiceover of Pocahontas character, we hear a rumination in what we can only assume to be the dead women's voice--and soo ephemeral are they, soo moody and mercurial, it serves something like the opposite function of a traditional voiceover. They are the fragments of thoughts, prayers, letters home, yet as these forms bleed into one another, and as the voiceovers blur the boundaries of inner and outer--at times what begins as a line of spoken dialogue ends as a voiceover. The idiosyncratic, rather disaffected nature of Pocahontas observations provides a perfectly sobering contrast to the intoxicating beauty on screen. We're looking at this world and, more specifically, the film's central love triangle through her singular eyes, while she seems to occupy something of a world of her own, fairly oblivious or indifferent to the England or "new" world. Hence, the film's supposed dispassion.

It is such a profoundly complex and subtly provocative film that it doesn't fail to simply astonish me. Its elusive stream-of-consciousness contemplations read over the moving scores and transposed against Emmanuel Lubezki's breathtaking, elusive imagery perfectly epitomize Malick's singular, utterly indispensable cinematic genius. It struck me tonight more than ever before that one of the key themes in Malick's filmization of Martin Heidegger's philosophy is our seemingly instinctive ability to revert back to some elevated moment or idealistic sense of emotional (or spiritual) purity when we find ourselves trapped in such tense, nearly unliveable situations. The most obvious examples of this in the film are Colin Farrell's character day-dreams of the minimal utopian life he had with Pocahontas, dressed in soft, summer colors and bathed in an ethereal glow of virginal beauty and Pocahontas character wishing that she might be able to meet death with guidence of a spiritual being.

Malick is a genius. All four of the films he's helmed are flat-out masterpieces, and, film for film. The Thin Red Line might just be the best war film ever made--it's certainly the most genuinely poetic--and that's exactly what Malick essentially is: a cinematic poet. The images in all of his films are so painterly and unforgettable; their pairing with haunting, meditative voice-over narration and beautiful, elusive scores is exactly why Malick is arguably the greatest American filmmaker of his generation. Let's just keep our fingers crossed that he eventually makes Tree Of Life(read: another masterwork)--and hopefully sooner rather than later!