I caught The New World , Terrence Malick’s latest film, this past weekend. I’ve seen two Malick films in the theater (this and The Thin Red Line) and in both instances several people walked out in the middle fustrated with being baited by a mainstream genre (war film, historical epic) only to be bored by Malick’s pensive approach (long shots of nature, no bombastic score, poetic narration). I’ve also seen Badlands , but that was at home on DVD and I didn’t walk out.

I found The New World fascinating, beautiful, and surpisingly calming for a film that I went in thinking would foreshadow the horrors of Native American genocide. But it doesn’t spend time on that topic, because it never gets to that point in history. It certainly delves into the rocky relationship between the settlers and the “naturals,” as they were called by them, but it’s more about the possibilities that opened when two radically different cultures meet. This film is far more optimistic than, say, Nick Roeg’s Walkabout , where the meeting of two foreign cultures leads to an explicit tragic end. Here it’s unspoken, but nonetheless we as viewers are painfully aware of where things are going.

My only non-trivial fustration with Malick is his tendency to use laconic and overbearing narration during drawn out otherwise quiet scenes. But I love his use of cinematography, the natural sounds on the soundtrack, and the sparse but wisely used score of James Horner. It’s the kind of score I think could’ve made Lord of the Rings a better trilogy.