This romantic epic brings to life the tale of Pocahontas and her relationship with adventurer John Smith set during the turbulent beginnings of America.
Arriving with a British expedition in Virginia in 1607, Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) is captured by Native Americans. His life is spared thanks to Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), daughter of the tribe’s chief. Smith and Pocahontas fall in love, to the mutual dismay of the Native Americans and the British. Smith is sent away, and his death is reported. An unhappy Pocahontas marries settler John Rolfe (Christian Bale). When Smith turns up alive, Pocahontas is torn between the two men.
Terrence Malick’s “The New World” strips away all the fancy and lore from the story of Pocahontas and her tribe and the English settlers at Jamestown, and imagines how new and strange these people must have seemed to one another. If the Indians stared in disbelief at the English ships, the English were no less awed by the somber beauty of the new land and its people. Pocahontas…was given the gift of sensing the whole picture, and that is what Malick founds his film on, not tawdry stories of love and adventure. – Roger Ebert
Starring Colin Farrell, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, Q’orianka Kilcher.