| country =

| language =

| budget = $30 million

| gross = $49.3 million After The Thin Red Line, Malick worked on a film about Che Guevara and his failed revolution in Bolivia. When financing had yet to come through, Malick was offered the chance to direct The New World and left the Guevara project in March 2004. Production on The New World was underway by July of that year.

Filming

The New World was the first collaboration between Malick and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The film was notable for its emphasis on authenticity, from location, settings and costumes to the casting of Native American actors and extras who were trained by Blair Rudes, professor of linguistics at UNC-Charlotte, to speak a form of the extinct Powhatan language (a type of Virginian Algonquian) reconstructed for the film by Rudes. Some footage was also filmed at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, England. Principal photography wrapped after three and a half months in November 2004. often trimming his films and leaving entire characters out of the final print, as is the case with The Thin Red Line. In early December, a 150-minute version was shown to critics for awards season consideration. It was released for a week from Christmas to New Year's Day in two theaters each in Los Angeles and New York to qualify for the Academy Awards.

For the film's wide release, which began on January 20, 2006, Malick re-edited the film, cutting it to 135 minutes, but also adding footage not seen in the first release. He altered some of the film's extensive voiceovers to clarify the plot. Substantial changes were made to the first half-hour of the picture, seemingly to speed the plot along.

Music

The musical score for The New World was composed by James Horner. He worked first from the script and then from edited scenes. As the film was re-edited, more changes to the score were required. Because Malick's editing was extensive and involved reordering or dropping passages or inserting sequences, much of Horner's score was not used. For the final version, Malick used sections of Horner's music along with the prelude to Wagner's Das Rheingold, Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23, and other pieces. Horner and Glen Ballard wrote and recorded the song "Listen to the Wind", sung by Hayley Westenra, for the closing credits, but this too was unused.

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 63% based on 191 reviews, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The site's critics consensus reads, "Despite arresting visuals and strong lead performances, The New World suffers from an unfocused narrative that will challenge viewers' attention spans over its 2 1/2 hours." Review aggregator Metacritic gave the film a score of 73 out of 100, based on 38 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "D+" on an A+ to F scale.

Roger Ebert awarded the film a full four out of four, arguing that "what distinguishes Malick's film is how firmly he refuses to know more than he should...The events in his film, including the tragic battles between the Indians and the settlers, seem to be happening for the first time." He also lauded Malick as a "visionary". Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle hailed the film as "a masterpiece", while others such as Ty Burr of The Boston Globe, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, Richard Corliss of Time, and David Ansen of Newsweek gave positive reviews.

On the other hand, Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post faulted the film for being "stately almost to the point of being static", while Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal criticized it as "sluggish", "underdramatized", and "emotionally remote". While its release was timed for consideration for the awards season, it was nominated only for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Emmanuel Lubezki at the 78th Academy Awards.

In November 2009, Time Out New York ranked the film as the fourth best of the decade, saying, "The particular power of this tone poem comes from how quietly resigned both characters are to their fates, as if they sense a guiding hand in their every action. The final passages of Malick's idyll, after Pocahontas takes a fateful ocean journey, are the finest work of his career, most notably in his portrayal of the princess's death and transfiguration—a shattering five-minute sequence that never fails to move." In January 2010, Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle designated it the number one film of the decade:<blockquote>Terence Malick's one-of-a-kind film, about the life of Pocahontas and the dawn of American history, contains some of the best filmmaking imaginable – some of it beyond imagining. I have seen it at least five times and have no idea how Malick knew, when he put it all together, that the movie would even make sense. It's difficult to write a great short poem. It's difficult to write a great long novel. But to write a great long poem that's the size of a great long novel – one that makes sense, doesn't flag and is exponentially better than the short poem or the long novel ever would have been – that's almost impossible. Malick did it. With images.</blockquote>The French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma ranked the film as 9th place in its list of best films of the decade 2000–2009. Film and television critic Matt Zoller Seitz has said it is his favorite film.

In The Guardian, John Patterson writes that The New World "doesn't have fans, just fanatics":

<blockquote>This decade hasn't been up to much, movie-wise, but I am more than ever convinced that when every other scrap of celluloid from 2000-2009 has crumbled to dust, one film will remain, like some Ozymandias-like remnant of transient vanished glory in the desert. And that film is The New World, Terrence Malick's American foundation myth, which arrived just as the decade reached its dismal halfway point, in January 2006.... The New World is a bottomless movie, almost unspeakably beautiful and formally harmonious. The movie came and went within a month, and its critical reception was characterised for the most part by bafflement, condescension, lazy ridicule and outright hostility.... Its siblings are to be found throughout movie history and across all national and stylistic boundaries, from the silents to Jean-Luc Godard, James Benning and Stan Brakhage, or in Winstanley and Barry Lyndon. Its cultural hinterland is made up not just of other movies, but of Buddhism, ethnography and naturalism, Wagner, Mozart and the structural forms of classical music, Malick's enthusiasm for bird-watching, and a helping of Heidegger and Kant... It is both ancient and modern, cinema at its purest and most organic, its simplest and most refined.</blockquote>

thumb|right|upright=1.2|[[Pocahontas, 1616 copper engraved print by Simon van de Passe]]

In a contribution to The cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic visions of America, film scholar Mark Cousins writes, "By the end of The New World, it seemed to me, I had experienced something like a Bach's Mass in B minor or a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was about rapture and the end of rapture. It showed me seeing. It made me sensible."

In a 2016 international critics' poll conducted by the BBC, The New World was voted the 39th-greatest film since 2000.

Historical accuracy

Most scholars agree that there was no romantic relationship between Pocahontas and Smith. She would have been 12 years old in 1608 when they were said to have first met. The film also depicts Pocahontas's marriage with Rolfe as being more peaceful and socially accepted than it was historically.

Awards and nominations

{| class="wikitable"

! Awards/Awards Body || Cast/crew member|| Category || Result

|-

| Academy Awards|| Emmanuel Lubezki || Best Achievement in Cinematography ||

|-

| ALMA Awards|| Q'orianka Kilcher || Outstanding Actress in a Motion Picture ||

|-

|rowspan ="2" | Broadcast Film Critics Association|| James Horner || Best Composer ||

|-

| Q'orianka Kilcher || Best Young Actress ||

|-

|rowspan ="2" | Chicago Film Critics Association|| Emmanuel Lubezki || Best Achievement in Cinematography ||

|-

| Q'orianka Kilcher || Most Promising Performer ||

|-

|rowspan ="2" | Mar del Plata Film Festival|| Emmanuel Lubezki || Kodak Award ||

|-

| Terrence Malick|| Best Film ||

|-

| National Board of Review|| Q'orianka Kilcher || Best Breakthrough Performance by an Actress ||

|-

|rowspan ="3" | Online Film Critics Society Awards|| Q'orianka Kilcher || Best Breakthrough Performance ||

|-

| Emmanuel Lubezki|| Best Cinematography ||

|-

| James Horner|| Best Original Score ||

|-

| San Diego Film Critics Society Awards|| Emmanuel Lubezki || Best Cinematography ||

|-

| Washington DC Area Film Critics Association|| Q'orianka Kilcher || Best Breakthrough Performance ||

|-

| Young Artist Awards|| Q'orianka Kilcher || Best Performance in a Feature Film<br/>(Comedy or Drama) – Leading Young Actress ||

|}

Home media

A third, 172-minute version, dubbed "The Extended Cut", was issued by New Line on DVD in October 2008. It contains new scenes and expansions to other scenes. The 135-minute and 172-minute cuts are widely available on DVD worldwide, with the 172-minute cut also released on Blu-ray. The 150-minute version was released commercially only twice—as a Digital Download briefly available to buyers of the US "Extended Cut" DVD in 2008, and on DVD in Italy as part of Italian distributor Eagle Pictures's 2-disc set, containing both the 150-minute and 135-minute versions of the film.

On July 26, 2016, all three cuts were released on Blu-ray and DVD in the United States by The Criterion Collection with the 172-minute extended cut from a new 4K digital restoration supervised by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and director Terrence Malick.

References

  • Terrence Malick's New World, Richard Neer, nonsite.org
  • The New World: Dwelling in Malick's New World an essay by Tom Gunning at the Criterion Collection