January
10
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The Revenant (2015)
These days the word ‘epic’ is tiresomely attached to every second movie coming out of Hollywood. What it really means is grand in scale, heroic, arduous and extraordinary, and these descriptors are perfect for this adventure-revenge story that is epic in every sense. Based on fact, legend or both and set in 1823, it’s a vengeful tale of frontiersman and fur trapper Hugh Glass who was mauled by a grizzly bear and abandoned to die after witnessing his son’s murder.
It has a linear plotline with several story themes that many viewers will miss entirely, so overwhelming is Leonardo DiCaprio’s commanding performance. You could not imagine a role more different from his acclaimed performances in The Great Gatsby (2013) or The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). The action scenes are hyper-realistic to the point where you can almost smell the grizzly’s hot angry breath in your face, or feel the physical warmth on crawling into a gutted horse carcass to survive the freezing night. The natural-light cinematography is majestically beautiful, the framed landscapes pure art, and the pristine frontier a silent voice about the damage to nature not yet done by man.
Like so many frontier tales, its a one-sided colonial history where natives are demonised and the white man will eventually triumph when the Cavalry arrives; but that’s the mythology of taming the frontier wherever the story is told. At a few points, I thought of Monty Python’s sketch where the knights in armour progressively sliced off each other’s body parts but continued to battle, as the agony endured by Hugh and his swift recovery requires a suspension of disbelief to stay engaged with the story. Otherwise, this film ticks all the top boxes for storytelling, casting, filming and action. It really is an epic.
Director: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter
CineMuseFilms 
Great review, man! I’m jealous of your writing 😛 Truly an “epic” film!
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A nice capsule review of this film. It tells me it is a film worth seeing. However, it also tells me that this is a film that I am going to let go by. The wonderful cinematography is not strong enough to counterbalance my desire to avoid epic struggles on film-at least for the first quarter of 2016.
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Cool comment, thanks. Its interesting how films can affect us differently depending on where our head is at different times. Keep it on your list.
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Excellent take on this. To me, it’s more of a cinematography accomplishment than it is story or even common sense wise. My biggest complaint with the film is that no one seems to understand what causes hypothermia as well as the need to include a victim made entirely out of whole cloth. http://coolpapae.com/2016/01/16/the-revenant-12-its-mostly-true-mostly/
Thanks for your time and I look forward to future reviews.
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I thought they tried to romanticize Glass’ suffering and revenge here, but someone pointed out to me that it’s actually poetic that way. And I think it is, too.
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I was hugely disappointed by the mistakes that were overlooked in this film. While the cinematography was extraordinary, I thought the chase scenes using dummy horses were poorly executed for today’s CGI standards. I was annoyed by the constant bugling of elk throughout the film which supposedly encompasses an entire winter. Elk bugle during mating season in the fall, but rarely so during the middle of winter when such antics would only attract predators. And worst of all, an early scene in the film shows a short glimpse of a moose, but that beast is then referred to as an elk. I thought my eyes had played tricks on me, but my companion saw the same thing that I did. All that grousing aside, I like your review and I agree that DiCaprio’s performance was amazing.
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I also found several editing and directing errors, but I was prepared to immediately forgive them in order to stay with the sweep of the narrative and its poetic cinematography (too generously perhaps).
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Nah, I was too hypercritical because I live in the west and know the outdoors and the movie was billed as based on a true story but seemed more like fantasy fiction to me. I know some of that happened, but there were some other things that simply could not have. But I was hard on the movie. Your review is well done and more generous.
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My Review:
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This was an intense film. I concentrated more on the general human nature vs. nature and how there were struggles among the humans and the humans with nature. How in the beginning, it’s always about money, at the expense of humanity and nature.
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