The New World (2005) -vs- Black Robe (1991)

Review by Bryce Zabel 

You may think you know the story of Captain John Smith and Pocahontas and the Jamestown settlement. But Terrence Malik's The New World strips that story down to its core and it's a thing of beauty. It is also a relatively balanced story where the "New World" being encountered is not just white Europeans meeting Native Americans (or "naturals" as they are called back then) but the feeling the naturals have seeing these men and their ships arrive, knowing in their hearts that things will likely never be the same. What Malik has brilliantly done is imagined how these two very different civilizations would come together and tell the story as a smaller, more personal, story.

"Got any women around these parts?"

Our Smackdown opponent is Black Robe which, when it came out 15 years ago, got inside my brain with some of its themes and images and has never let go.  It tells the story of the first contacts between the Huron Indians of Quebec and the Jesuit missionaries from France who came to convert them to Catholicism and, like the Jamestown settlers, turned out to be about the worst thing that could befall them.

Both these films go to extraordinary lengths to create a realistic depiction of what Indian life was like at the beginning of their encounters with the white men. If anything, Black Robe feels even more real but its story is also much bleaker and depressing. In addition, the story of Black Robe has not been told to any great degree in our history classes while The New World has been taught to nearly every American school kid. It is a story that most needs a telling like this new one.

The New World. Because it's a finely imagined, beautifully crafted, poem about the very, very beginning of this clash of civilizations and a fine love story at that.