I think a lot of people expected "The New World" to be an adventure story.
 I had that idea too, but I had also seen Malick's earlier films so I had
learned to "expect the unexpected."  I would agree with the New Yorker
critic, who wrote: "Whole passages of non-event stream by, and you half
want to scream, and yet—damn it all—by the end of “The New World” the
spell of the images, plus the enigma of Kilcher’s [Pocahontas] expression
. . . somehow breaks you down."  It IS slow, but I didn't really mind (a
Bach sonata is slow too), and when the story reached England I felt the
whole thing ascend into something wonderful and extremely powerful and
moving.

Henry Wiencek

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