Captain Smith is spared a mutinous hanging sentence after Captain Newport's ship arrives in the year of 1607 to found Jamestown, an English colony in Virginia. The initially friendly natives, who have no personal property concept, turn hostile after a 'theft' is 'punished' violently immediately. During an armed exploration, Smith is captured but spared when the Chief's favorite daughter Pocahontas pleads for the stranger. He soon becomes her lover and he learns to love their naive 'savage' way of harmonious life. Ultimately, he returns to the grim fort where he would starve but Pocahontas has arranged for Indian generosity. But, each side soon brands their own lover a traitor. She is banished and he is flogged as an introduction to the life of a slave. Changes happen again, leading Smith to accept a northern mission and Pocahontas to become anglicized. Pocahontas becomes the mother of aristocratic John Rolfe's son and John is her new lover.
The Indians stared in disbelief when they first saw the English ships. The English were awed by the somber beauty of the new land and the strangeness of the people. They called the Indians the Naturals but they didn’t really understand how well the term applied. The Indians live and thrive because they submit to the realities of their land and the English nearly die because they are ignorant and arrogant. Nature is in the foreground, instead of using it as a picturesque backdrop as other stories might have done. Pocahontas is driven by curiosity about these strange visitors and empathy with their plight as strangers to the land. She has admiration for Smith's reckless and intrepid courage. She does not fall in love with him but she saves his life when he is about to killed by an order from her father as the chief. Smith doesn't have regard for women and he is not fair with Pocahontas. She later meets John Rolfe and in him she finds loyalty and honesty.
The focus of this film is on a clash of civilizations. European and Native Indian beginning in 1607. In the new colony there is difficulty in intercultural communication. There are battle scenes with guns, spear, tomahawks, explosions and bloody bodies. There are long passages without language that might be dull for some younger viewers? It does show the spirituality of the Native Americans, their integration with the natural world, family relationships, tribal life, generosity and intelligence. Long nature scenes and the internal dialogs of Pocahontas and John Smith are the best parts of this film. 5* (I really liked this movie)
135 min, biography directed and written by Terrence Malick with Colin Farrell, Q’orianka Kilcher, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, David Thewlis, York van Wageningen, Raoul Max Trujillo, Michael Greyeyes, Kalani Queypo, Noah Taylor.
Note: Imdb 6.7 out of 10 with 82,292 reviews, Rotten Tomatoes 63% with 188 critics 58% with 148,108 audience scores, Slant Magazine 4* Ed Gonzalez, Roger Ebert 4*, Common Sense Media Cynthia Fuchs, 3* out of 5*, age 13+, 3* violence, Amazon 4.1* out of 5* with 1615 reviews.
Special Note: This is the second Pocahontas movie Christian Bale has been involved with. He provided the voice for Thomas in the Disney animated film Pocahontas of 1995. In an interview, Bale spoke of the eccentric directing styles of Terrence Malick. Bale said that he wanted to see what Malick would do if he just walked out of a shot and towards the crew. Malick followed Christian with the camera and as Bale put it, the crew were running? They were diving behind bushes to get away from the camera. Because of Malick’s habit of cutting and editing his films repeatedly, much of the music that James Horner wrote for this film never made it to the final cut except for a few fragments. In an interview, Horner said that Malick loved his score but had no clue about what to do with it? He concluded that working with Malick was "the most disappointing experience I've ever had with a man" and that "I never felt so letdown by a filmmaker in my life!!!"
Mistakes: In the early portion of the movie, the natives are shown harvesting corn (maize), the ears of the corn are far larger than a human hand. At the time of the Jamestown colony, native corn was typically the size of a human thumb and rarely ever bigger. Large ears of corn such as pictured in the movie are a product of seed selection and genetic research. This mostly practiced beginning in the 1860s. In the film, John Smith is seen wearing tattoos. This film is set in the early1600s and the practice of tattooing was abandoned in Europe at that time and was not readopted until the late 18th century. A pier that is covered with wood boards shows signs of modern machining processes on them?
No comments:
Post a Comment