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Just perfect...

Admirable film.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Reading the reviews, I can tell this movie wasn't popular with the average movie-goer, and I can't really blame them or expect them to agree with me. So, maybe this is a very personal review, but I found this movie very pleasing to my taste. I enjoy movies that are soft and calm. It's very calming and stress-reducing. And I love the way it was edited to show her transition from innocent child-likeness to womanhood. I thought the editing was brilliant because it moved along at a slow but continual pace, like the river so often shown in the movie. But most of all, I loved the interaction between the actors, especially Q'Orianka. She's so hauntingly beautiful and mesmerizing. I wish this movie could have gotten more love because I feel so alone in my love for it. But for now, I'll continue to enjoy it on my own and treasure it as one of my favorites.

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.

Captain John Smith and his men are weary, starving, and outnumbered during the early days of Jamestown, but Smith has more on his mind than survival. He also seems uninterested in higher walls and deeper mines, yet the men insist that he preside over the colony. While his superiors believe he has the makings of a great leader, I feel it's the dreamer, not the leader, in Smith that gets Pocahontas' attention. So the well-known legend goes that she throws herself on his lap and insists his life be spared at the moment her tribe is about to execute him. I'd say the rest is history, but as far as Smith and Pocahontas are concerned the rest is fiction. Pocahontas may have in fact pardoned him from execution, but in real life they were never a couple. No matter, though. We like the story of Pocahontas and John Smith sharing something original and wondrous, teaching each other the ways of the East and the West, becoming one. Suppose our nation had evolved that way.The New World wants us to suppose that the two of them may have been in love, or at least dreamed that they were for a time. Or maybe they both just dreamed, but dreamed together. It struck me how right Malick was for this story, because of his ability to evoke wonder. He reminded me that the founding of Jamestown, while grotesque for the founders, must have been magical for some of the Powhatan tribe. So magical that of course it was a ten year old girl who was best able to really believe it, and to keep up with it. The rest could only gawk, and commence killing each other as they struggled to grasp what was going on.There is a brief scene where Smith invites a tribesman into the fort to let him look around. As the warrior wanders about, the colonists ready their weapons. But Smith assures them that he's harmless. 'Mad,' he says. The Powhatan indeed has a crazed look in his eyes, but I questioned if he was in fact crazy. It could be that he simply displayed bewilderment commensurate with how astonishing the arrival of the English must have been. I certainly can only begin to imagine being a Powhatan and seeing massive sailing vessels emerge out of the mist. Were they floating islands? And what about the masts? Were they animal skins? What animal was so large that skinning it yielded an entire mast? And weapons… from what sorts of trees did the English whittle rifles? What was armor made from? Silver tree bark? What did it feel like to run through a forest of of silver trees? And if the trees were silver, then what was the grass like, in that distant land they called England?For most of the English, though, discovering the Powhatans must have been a far less interesting experience, I daresay. The early settlers were workers hired to extract resources and create trading opportunity, not unlike ditch diggers paid by a big box corporation at the outskirts of a suburb. What interests me is the rift in perspective between the one who's there with a specific mission in mind, and the other who was there already, and is now, all too suddenly, witnessing the arrival of aliens more great and terrible than the imagination could have prepared them for.So it was the Indians, not the settlers, whose imaginations were open-ended. That's why Pocahontas played the part she did in American and English history. Being a ten year old princess, she was simply the most open to the English not as a business partner or a threat, but a culture, a people, a person because it is our awareness that allows us to dream. I recently read an article about the regrets of the dying. According to the nurse who recorded the most common laments, the number one regret of patients was that they lived the life expected of them, not a life true to their self. Expectations can enhance, but also cloud experience because subjectivity is both powerful and precarious. The motivations we carry around with us can be our friend or our enemy. For the English, motivation was a blinder.Maybe this belief of mine is why I tend to live spontaneously. Planning isn't a big part of my life. But I find that my experiences are most vivid when I don't know what's coming next. Maybe this is why vacations are stressful for the parents, magical for the children. Controlling what came next was Smith's job, and it distracted him so much that he failed to see what he had.So what did he have, other than a lucrative investment? In my opinion, the English had an opportunity to create something truly new. Not a new version of England, but an original nation. They had an ancient civilization there to compliment their own. They had the potential to grow and evolve with the Indians the way that differing tribes had learned to coexist in flux with one another over centuries. Had both sides, the natives and the aliens, just been able to keep their fear, greed, and pride in check, the two cultures might have found themselves in love with one another. They might have seen that potential.Pocahontas saw it, embraced it, and lived what I imagine to be the the greatest experience life has to offer: the waking dream. And I believe she lived that dream for the rest of her life. I think that John Smith embraced it, too, if only for a minute. He soon woke up, though, and got back to securing the future of the English stronghold. After all, that's why he was there to begin with. We can't all be dreamers, all the time.

Okay, let me start off by saying that I think Colin Farrell is one the WORST actors out there, and has ruined a lot of potentially good movies because of that. The only reason I gave this film an 8 is because of him and his awful acting.Beyond that, I cannot see why anyone could really hate this movie! Sure, it's not a settlers vs natives shootout action flick, but is that what we've all come to expect as movie goers in the 21st century? There are many other elements in his movie that make it great besides the action.People complain about the narration reflecting the lack of screen writing ability, but i think it's perfect for a film like this, exploring inside the mind of someone who is just exploring this new place at that point in history. A lot of the complaints I've read about this movie are unwarranted, unless you blame Colin Farrell :)