Embodying the true story of John Smith, an English explorer, who has been arrested by Native Americans, but by the help of Pocahontas, the daughter of their leader, with whom he falls in love, everything changes.
The filmmakers are very wise to make this New World, and the people in it, seem untouched, immediate, and present. There may be a small amount of cultural foreboding, but it is heard distantly, like an echo of lamentation.
Discovery is a sensory experience by nature, and to lightly run one's fingers through someone's hair in The New World is to know them in some fundamental way.
The New World is stately almost to the point of being static and thus has trouble finding a central story around which to arrange itself; it's not quite the thin dead line, but it's close.
He [Malick] swoons for his own well-honed image as a painter of woodland idylls, a man who leaves no sway of wheat or ripple of water unmet by his fatherly gaze.