It must have looked just like this.

The land — dark and wild, with virtually no sign of human life.

The quiet — with only bird songs, the wind and the creaks and groans of the rigging of those tiny three ships — Godspeed, Sarah Constant and Discovery.

The majesty and mystery of that first moment of encounter at Jamestown — utter bafflement, mixed with fascination and fear.

Terrence Malick's "The New World" is no Disney version of the John Smith-Pocahontas story. It's unlike most any mainstream, big-budget film you've ever seen. It's slow, largely non-verbal, a quiet tableaux that demands close to total immersion, and requires some foreknowledge of that famous tale.

Its glacial pace and non-narrative story won't be for every taste. But "The New World" is a stunningly detailed re-creation of a place and time, and an imaginative view of what might have happened when a American Indian girl, a "natural," as the English called them, used her neck to save Capt. John Smith's nearly 400 years ago in Virginia.

Colin Farrell plays Smith, an insolent loner locked in irons when we meet him on arrival in the James River. He's a well-traveled soldier, pragmatic and naturally out of step with the sadistic ruling class, the get-rich-quick fops and poor, greedy tradesmen who made up that first permanent English settlement in North America.

To Malick's credit, he has made this Smith very much a man of his time, no politically correct updating of his nature to match modern sensibilities. His quarrels with his fellow colonists are practical and violent and historically accurate. He was the one insisting they were wasting time digging for gold when they should be planting something they could eat.

But he was as ready as the next fellow to take arms against the "naturals" when they started to realize that the English aimed to outstay their welcome.

Then Smith spends time as a hostage, and meets their warriors (the always terrific Wes Studi of "Last of the Mohicans") and their chief, Powhatan (the regal August Schellenberg of "Free Willy"). He develops an appreciation for their ways of surviving and thriving in this new world.

And through encounters with a girl young enough to be his daughter, he makes that first real connection between cultures, one that history shows forever changed her life even as history lost track of his. He's wary, but smitten, in spite of the historians who say that never happened.

Q'Orianka Kilcher plays the daughter of the chief, who is never called "Pocahontas" in the film, but who is taken with the white, bearded stranger and who saves him from execution. Kilcher is an exotic, unconventional beauty, but she and Malick keep Pocahontas from becoming a New World Lolita. Barely.

It's a visual story, one that doesn't require dialogue or subtitles for us to follow it. Malick paints the celluloid like a canvas, filling it with rapturous images of Wild America, its flowing fields of grass, rivers teeming with fish and the endless horizon of "free" land that made the English think of this swampy corner of Virginia as "paradise."

But early on in his career, Malick, of "Days of Heaven" and "The Thin Red Line," became enamoured of the interior monologue, letting the characters tell the story, or just muse on who they are and their situation, in voice over.

In "The New World," this passion becomes an obsession, and a maddening one. The solitary ambles through the grass, the meaningful stares at the horizon, coupled with the actor's voice in the act of navel gazing.

"The Thin Red Line" was filled with these moments, too. But this film is much more coherent, a wholly realized vision of the birth of a nation, of a culture clash that created something not-quite-British, a new kind of person for a new kind of world.

But that flaw suggests what Malick was aiming for, here. This is the "2001" of American history, a meditative work of magic. As the many failed movies about Columbus told us, that moment of first contact was epochal. Maybe, Malick says, it takes a new kind of storytelling to truly capture that first look at the people and the land of this New World.

<b>TITLE:</b> "The New World"<b>DIRECTOR: </b>Terrence Malick<b>CAST: </b>Colin Farrell, Q'Orianka Kilcher, David Thewlis, August Schellenberg, Wes Studi, Christian Bale and Christopher Plummer.<b>RATED: </b>PG-13 for intense battle sequences<b>GRADE: </b>4 Stars (on a scale of 5)