New World: Evening up the score

While I think the review of The New World in Indian Country Today is important, it doesn't tell the whole story. According to the Rottentomatoes.com website, a little more than half the reviewers liked the movie. Specifically, it has a "Tomatometer" rating of 54, which isn't enough to qualify it as "Fresh" but does put it in the upper range of "Rotten" movies.

(Here's the methodology: The Tomatometer rating is obtained by dividing the number of good reviews by the number of reviews. Movies with a 60 or more qualify as "Fresh" and all others as "Rotten." The New World has 62 good reviews out of 115. Rottentomatoes.com collects a lot of reviews, and it's by far one of the most useful websites around.)

Anyway, Terrence Malik is a filmmaker to reckon with, and the movie got favorable reviews from The New York Times, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times, among others. Roger Ebert's review in The Chicago Sun-Times doesn't miss the cultural angle:

The are two new worlds in this film, the one the English discover, and the one Pocahontas discovers. Both discoveries center on the word "new," and what distinguishes Malick's film is how firmly he refuses to know more than he should in Virginia in 1607 or London a few years later. The events in his film, including the tragic battles between the Indians and the settlers, seem to be happening for the first time. No one here has read a history book from the future.

There are the familiar stories of the Indians helping the English survive the first winter, of how they teach the lore of planting corn and laying up stores for the winter. We are surprised to see how makeshift and vulnerable the English forts are, how evolved the Indian culture is, how these two civilizations could have built something new together -- but could not, because what both societies knew at that time did not permit it. Pocahontas could have brought them together. In a small way, she did. She was given the gift of sensing the whole picture, and that is what Malick founds his film on, not tawdry stories of love and adventure. He is a visionary, and this story requires one.