Like all Terrence Malick’s other work, this one’s beautiful but slooooooow. Considering even the 90 minute long Badlands and Days of Heaven were pretty slow-moving, the fact that both this movie and Malick’s last, The Thin Red Line, add between 45 and 90 minutes to that is really his biggest, perhaps only, failing as a director. There’s plenty that could be stripped away here.

Disregarding this, and the fact that I knew it could never better Disney’s Pocahontas for me, it’s still as beautiful a movie as any of the others mentioned above. Q’Orianka Kilcher makes a beautiful and enchanting Pocahontas and Colin Farrell a better John Smith than I’d imagined. James Horner’s score is perhaps his best work since Titanic, even coming across a little like Philip Glass at times, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography is practically hypnotic.

On the cheap thrill level, I also like that Irene Bedard and Christian Bale are in this movie – Bedard, who voiced Pocahontas in the Disney version, here plays her mother, while Bale, who voiced one of John Smith’s men in the Disney version, plays the man Pocahontas ends up marrying back in England.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 6:55 pm in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.