The cast includes Colin Farrell, Q'orianka Kilcher, Christopher Plummer, Christian Bale, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, David Thewlis, Yorick van Wageningen and John Savage.

The production team includes director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, producer Sarah Green, production designer Jack Fisk, costume designer Jacqueline West, composer James Horner and film editors Richard Chew, Hank Corwin, Saar Klein and Mark Yoshikawa.

In 1607, Pocahontas, the adventurous daughter of Chief Powhatan, and others from her tribe witness the arrival of three ships sent by English royal charter to found a colony in the New World.

While the settlement's prospects are initially bright, disease, poor discipline, supply shortages, and tensions with local Native Americans, whom Newport calls "the naturals", jeopardize the expedition.

Taking a small group upriver to seek trade while Newport returns to England for supplies, Smith is captured by Native Americans and brought before Chief Powhatan.

Smith discovers the settlement in turmoil and is pressed into accepting the governorship, finding the peace he had with the Natives replaced by privation, death, and the difficulties of his new position.

The English sea captain Samuel Argall, while on a trading expedition up the Potomac River, convinces them to abduct Pocahontas from the Patawomecks as a prisoner in order to negotiate with her father in exchange for captive settlers, but not for their stolen weapons and tools.

Opposing this plan, Smith is removed as governor and imprisoned, but renews his love affair after Pocahontas is brought to Jamestown.

Captain Newport returns, freeing Smith and telling him of an offer from the king to lead his own expedition to find passage to the East Indies.

[11] For the final version, Malick used sections of Horner's music along with the prelude to Wagner's Das Rheingold, Mozart's Piano Concerto No.

Horner and Glen Ballard wrote and recorded the song "Listen to the Wind", sung by Hayley Westenra, for the closing credits, but this too was unused.

The site's critics consensus reads, "Despite arresting visuals and strong lead performances, The New World suffers from an unfocused narrative that will challenge viewers' attention spans over its 2 1/2 hours.

Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle hailed the film as "a masterpiece", while others such as Ty Burr of The Boston Globe, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, Richard Corliss of Time, and David Ansen of Newsweek gave positive reviews.

On the other hand, Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post faulted the film for being "stately almost to the point of being static", while Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal criticized it as "sluggish", "underdramatized", and "emotionally remote".

In November 2009, Time Out New York ranked the film as the fourth best of the decade, saying, "The particular power of this tone poem comes from how quietly resigned both characters are to their fates, as if they sense a guiding hand in their every action.

The final passages of Malick's idyll, after Pocahontas takes a fateful ocean journey, are the finest work of his career, most notably in his portrayal of the princess's death and transfiguration—a shattering five-minute sequence that never fails to move.

And that film is The New World, Terrence Malick's American foundation myth, which arrived just as the decade reached its dismal halfway point, in January 2006. ...

Its siblings are to be found throughout movie history and across all national and stylistic boundaries, from the silents to Jean-Luc Godard, James Benning and Stan Brakhage, or in Winstanley and Barry Lyndon.

Its cultural hinterland is made up not just of other movies, but of Buddhism, ethnography and naturalism, Wagner, Mozart and the structural forms of classical music, Malick's enthusiasm for bird-watching, and a helping of Heidegger and Kant ...

[20]In a contribution to The cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic visions of America, film scholar Mark Cousins writes, "By the end of The New World, it seemed to me, I had experienced something like a Bach's Mass in B minor or a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.