The New World
The New World is based on fact story, offering a chance to explore his familiar theme of man versus nature. So, it's lovely to look at because it takes an audience into the rarefied atmosphere of an art film made.
The New World is an epic adventure of European and Native American cultures. Inspired by the legend of John Smith and Pocahontas, acclaimed filmmaker Terrence Malick transforms this classic story into an exploration of love, loss and discovery.
Against the dramatic and historically inhabited by a great native civilization, Malick has set a dramatical tale of two main characters, a noble young native woman and an ambitious soldier of fortune.
In the early years of the 17th century, North America is a vast land of endless primeval wilderness populated of tribal cultures. Although these nations live in graceful harmony with their environment, their relations with each other are a bit more uneasy. All it will take to upset the balance is an intrusion from the outside.
On a spring day, three small ships bearing 103 men sail into this world from their distant home, the island kingdom of England, three thousand miles to the east across a vast ocean. They are seeking to establish a cultural, religious, and economic foothold on the coast of what they regard as the New World.
The lead ship of the tiny flotilla is called the Susan Constant. Shackled below decks in her ship is a rebellious 27-year-old named John Smith (Colin Farrell), the sentence and destiny will change as soon as the ship reaches land.
A veteran of European wars, Smith is a soldier who talented and popular to have his neck stretched by his own people, and so he is freed by Captain Christopher Newport soon after the Susan Constant drops anchor. As Captain Newport knows, and the colonists will soon discover that surviving in this unknown wilderness will require the services of every man.
Though they don't realize it at the time, Newport and his band of British settlers have landed in the midst of a sophisticated Native American empire ruled by the powerful Chieftain Powhatan. To the colonists, it may be a new world. But to Powhatan and his people, it is an ancient world, and the only one they have ever known.
The English, strangers in a strange land, struggle from the beginning, unable or, in some cases, stubbornly unwilling to fend for themselves. Smith, searching for assistance from the local tribesmen, chances upon a young woman who at first seems to be more woodland sprite than human being. A willful young woman whose family and friends affectionately call her "Pocahontas" or "playful one", she is the favorite of Powhatan's children. Before long develops between Smith and Pocahontas, a bond so powerful that it changes friendship or even romance and eventually becomes the basis of one of the most enduring American legends.