The New World (review)

Based on the previews of this film, I had already set low expectations for The New World. Nevertheless, a group of friends and I went with open minds, open hearts, and happy faces. As anxious as we were to witness this supposed epic, we set aside our biases as young educated Natives for the sake of all the hard work that was put into it, according to HBO. But our anxious departure would not be similar to our anxious arrival.

The movie began with wide shots of beautiful coastal and woodland landscapes, an impression of the Chesapeake Bay in 1607: wild, open, free, awaiting the arrival of European civilization. There was no need to introduce the plot because the director must assume that we, the audience, had already watched the Disney version or heard the tall tale in our sixth-grade classrooms. Any introduction would have been repetitive in telling the story from America's earliest folklore, the story of the famous Pocahontas and John Smith.

The introduction of John Smith (Colin Farrell) in this version of folklore was quite unique in contrast to his Mel Gibson persona in the Disney version. We learned from the beginning that this John Smith was a renegade, the "bad boy" if you will. Bound in chains and tried for mutiny, the bad Smith character develops into the hero, the savior, the lover boy, and the white male who is easily taken in by the tribe. There is no real difference between this John Smith and John Dunbar in Dances With Wolves.

The European arrival to "The New World" is much like the astronauts' arrival on The Planet of the Apes. There seems to be no sign of intelligence. Although there are beings that do possess both human and animal characteristics, for the most part they are as wild as the deer and as pitiful as toddler children in need of guardians. It was a shame to see the Powhatan kingdom, a confederacy that was as advanced and organized as the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, depicted as less than human in this twenty-first-century movie. Maybe America's film industry has not yet matured from the old John Wayne days.

The random movements of the Powhatan people were akin to those of monkeys, or like the indigenous people depicted in the latest King Kong. They lacked any sophistication or anything human. The Natives, or in The New World's case, the "naturals," wore thick layers of paint throughout the movie, as if they had no concept of bathing, although it is known that bathing was an advanced American Indian hygienic practice that awed even the most civilized of Europeans. Nevertheless, their thick layers of paint may convince audiences that either Indians wore paint without ever bathing or that they woke up every morning to glob their faces and bodies in frenzies of primitive vanity. And King Powahatan's turkey-feathered crown and raccoon tail robe were not fooling anyone. Just go to any commercial powwow, usually identifiable by the rich sponsoring Indian casino, and watch the blond-haired, blue-eyed dancer wearing the same outfit. These wild paint designs and outfits have no tribal affiliation and serve one purpose: to make people look wild. They should have stopped with the Disney cartoon.

The portrayed inferiority of the Natives places them in a category like no other in the existing body of contemporary Indian movies. They spoke, barked, and howled randomly like animals, yet our white hero was still able to decipher their primitive talk. They had no sense of culture, religion, art, or social and political organization, yet the settlement of white males outlasted the ancient civilization as if the whites' innate superiority was enough to topple the primitive kingdom. The Natives had no sense of anything other than hunting, warring, and playing. Their men fought, while their women played, as if the lives of indigenous Americans were no different than those of modern suburban middle-school children. They were generous, unselfish, and honest, something that modern Americans still perceive as primitive or childish.

The village scene...