- Whatever else it may be, Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant is a convincing justification for having separate Academy Awards categories for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. That Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography is outstanding is self-evident from any five minutes of this film, which somehow displays a hundred different shades of gray that I had never noticed in nature. There is also an argument to be made that Iñárritu earned his Best Director award with a camera that moves furtively through battles but is also capable of staring in awe at the snow-covered wilderness. And then there's the film as a whole, which feels like being on the receiving end of a two-and-a-half hour bear mauling.
- The Revenant doesn't have a plot so much as it has a "whathappens," and what happens is this: frontier scout Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a group of fur trappers are massacred by a group of Arikara, whose chief (Anthony Starlight) is searching for his missing daughter (Melaw Nakehk'o). Although Glass and his half-Pawnee son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) make it out alive, Glass is soonafter mauled by a bear. Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) offers rewards to trappers Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Bridger (Will Poulter) to stay with Glass for his presumed final hours, but the notably untrustworthy Fitzgerald decides instead to kill Hawk and bury Glass half-alive. The rest of the film depicts Glass crawling, trudging, and eventually riding in pursuit of revenge against Fitzgerald.
- While that may all sound pretty exciting, the film is basically a series of five-minute bursts of action separated by long, punishing stretches of DiCaprio grunting, groaning, and crawling around. The film presents itself a meditation on revenge, but I'm not sure it really has enough ideas to qualify. DiCaprio does his best with his handful of lines and Hardy pulls off an effective impression of Jeff Bridges doing an impression of a mean redneck, but the film's brutality is both unrelenting and uninteresting. The film's famous bear attack scene starts off interesting enough before stretching into accidental self-parody, which is a description that applies to the entire film. Personally, I would have preferred if The Revenant featured zero characters, choosing instead to depict the icy flowing rivers and wondrous snowcapped mountainscapes of the United States, Canada, and Argentina.
