Iñárritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith set their tone early, staging a breathtaking assault on a group of fur trappers by Native Americans, portrayed not just as “enemies” but a violent force of nature. While a few dozen men are preparing to pack up and move on to their next stop in the great American wilderness, a scene out of “Apocalypse Now” unfolds. Arrows pierce air and flesh as the few surviving men flee to a nearby boat. It turns out that the tribe is seeking a kidnapped daughter of its leader, and will kill anyone who gets in their way. At the same time, we learn that one of the trappers, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) has a half-Native American son named Hawk (Forrest Goodluck).
Low on men and hunted, the expedition leader Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) orders that their crew return to its base, a fort in the middle of this snowy wilderness. John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) disagrees, and the seeds of dissent are planted. He doesn’t trust Henry, and he doesn’t like Glass. In the midst of these discussions, Glass is away from the crew one day when he’s brutally attacked by a bear—the sequence is, without hyperbole, one of the most stunning things I’ve seen on film in a long time, heart-racing and terrifying. Glass barely survives the attack. It seems highly unlikely that he’ll make it back to the base. With increasingly dangerous conditions and a tribe of killers on their heels, they agree to split up. Most of the men will go back first while Fitzgerald, Hawk and a young man named Bridger (Will Poulter) will get a sizable fee to stay with Glass until he dies, giving him as much comfort as possible in his final days and the burial he deserves.
Of course, Fitzgerald quickly tires of having to watch a man he doesn’t care about die. He kills Hawk in front of an immobile Glass and then basically buries Hugh alive. As Bridger and Fitzgerald head back, Glass essentially rises from the dead (the word revenant means “one that returns after death or a long absence”) and begins his quest for vengeance. With broken bones, no food, and miles to go, he pulls himself through snow and across mountains, seeking the man who killed his son. He is practically a ghost, a man who has come as close to death as one possibly can but is unwilling to go to the other side until justice is done.
The bulk of “The Revenant” consists of this torturous journey, as Glass regains his strength and gets closer to home through sheer force of will. Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning cinematographer for “Birdman,” Emmanuel Lubezki (who also took a trophy for “Gravity” the year before and could easily make it three in a row for this work) shoots “The Revenant” in a way that conveys both the harrowing conditions and the artistry of his vision. The sky seems to go on forever; the horizon is neverending. He works in a color palette provided by nature, and yet enhanced. The snow seems whiter, the sky bluer. Many of his shots, especially in times of great danger like the opening attack and the bear scene, are unbroken--placing us in the middle of the action.
At other times, Lubezki’s choices recall his work on “The Tree of Life,” especially in scenes in the second half when Glass’s journey gets more mystical. And that’s where the film falters a bit. Iñárritu doesn’t quite have a handle on those second-half scenes and the 156-minute running time begins to feel self-indulgent as the film loses focus. When it centers on the conditions and the tale of a man unwilling to die, it’s mesmerizing. I just think there’s a tighter version, especially in the mid-section, that would be even more effective.
About that man: So much has been made of this film being DiCaprio’s “Overdue Oscar” shot that I feel like his actual work here will be undervalued. Make no mistake. Should he win, it will not be some “Lifetime Achievement” win as we’ve seen in the past for actors who we all thought should have won for another film (Paul Newman, Al Pacino, etc.). He’s completely committed in every terrifying moment, pushing himself further than he ever has before as an actor. Even just the physical demands of this protagonist would have been enough to break a lot of lesser actors, but it’s the way in which DiCaprio captures his internal fortitude that’s captivating—his body may be broken, but we believe he is unwilling to give up.
The minimal supporting cast is good, and it’s nice to see Gleeson continue to have an incredible 2015 (also in “Brooklyn,” “Ex Machina” and “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens”). Tom Hardy is less effective, often going a little too heavy on the tics (wide eyes, shot up-close), but I think that’s a fault of the direction and not one of our best actors. In the end, this is DiCaprio’s film through and through, and he nails every challenging beat, literally throwing himself into this character that demands more of him physically than any other before.
What would you do for vengeance? What conditions could you surmount to get it? Or would you just give up? Our favorite films often drop questions like these into our lives, allowing us to appreciate the world a little differently than before we saw them. “The Revenant” has this power. It lingers. It hangs in the back of your mind like the best classic parables of man vs. nature. It will stay there for quite some time.
Leonardo DiCaprio is garnering early Oscars buzz for his role in 'The Revenant,' which hits theaters in limited release on Christmas Day.
The film, which pairs DiCaprio with Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Inarritu ('Birdman'), is inspired by the life of mythical explorer Hugh Glass. Based on Michael Punke's novel, 'The Revenant' chronicles one man's adventure of survival in the early 19th century American wilderness.
'It's a really primal story of man and the natural world,' DiCaprio told The Associated Press. 'It's almost biblical.'
The 19th century survival epic, which was filmed in Calgary, Alberta and Argentina, co-stars Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson and Will Poulter.
Here's what critics are saying about 'The Revenant':
'DiCaprio's performance is an astonishing testament to his commitment to a role. That's really him plunging into that river. That's him staggering half-naked through the teeth-chattering cold. That's him grabbing a fish out of icy waters and eating it raw.' -- Soren Anderson, Seattle Times
'I think 'The Revenant' is, on the whole, pain without gain, but it's certainly a tour de force -- literally, a feat of strength. DiCaprio, Inarritu, cinematographer Emmanuel 'Chivo' Lubekzi, and their collaborators hauled themselves through the Canadian Rockies and deserve what respect one can muster, although their artistry is finite, a test of will and pyrotechnics and, yes, traditional masculinity instead of a search for what illuminates man's inhumanity to man.' -- David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture
'Few prestige directors have so fully committed to the notion of cinema as an endurance test as Alejandro G. Inarritu, and he pushes himself, the audience and an aggrieved 19th-century frontiersman well beyond their usual limits in 'The Revenant.' Bleak as hell but considerably more beautiful, this nightmarish plunge into a frigid, forbidding American outback is a movie of pitiless violence, grueling intensity and continually breathtaking imagery, a feat of high-wire filmmaking to surpass even Inarritu and d.p. Emmanuel Lubezki's work on last year's Oscar-winning 'Birdman.' Yet in attempting to merge a Western revenge thriller, a meditative epic in the Terrence Malick mold, and a lost-in-the-wilderness production of near-Herzogian insanity, 'The Revenant' increasingly succumbs to the air of grim overdetermination that has marred much of Inarritu's past work: It's an imposing vision, to be sure, but also an inflated and emotionally stunted one, despite an anchoring performance of ferocious 200 percent commitment from Leonardo DiCaprio.' -- Justin Chang, Variety
'Inarritu and [Emmanuel] Lubezki are taking chances with their camera -- chances, no doubt, made even more difficult by working with only natural light in frigid conditions. But it pays off, giving the film a singularly strange and haunting beauty.' -- Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly
'It's one brutal, badass epic. Hang on for the power of cinema unleashed and DiCaprio stretching his acting muscles, testing himself, eager for challenge. That you do not want to miss.' -- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
'Director/co-writer Alejandro G. Inarritu, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and a vast team of visual effects wizards have created a sensationally vivid and visceral portrait of human endurance under very nearly intolerable conditions.' -- Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter
Mature audiences
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Mind-Blowing
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Good Movie - Parents May Want to Give it a First Watch
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Not for movie pussies. They don't hold back.
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One of the best looking movies ever. DiCaprio is great, yet it was a pity Oscar. Also, story is a little weak, but still great.
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Well made but EXTREMLY violent and might be disturbing for some and a brief rape
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Very Good
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Violent and kind of long, but well-acted and well-shot.
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Okay so here's the deal..
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pretty scenery..SUPER LONG ..VIOLENT.. thats it...
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The Revenant
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Oscar Worthy
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Stunning and Grisly Fight to Survive
The Revenant 2015
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Gritty in every sense of the word
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Beautiful Movie but a 12 year old does NOT need go through this
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Extremely brutal revenge Western brings best out of all involved
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Snooze Fest
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It’s man versus bear. And bear wins. Or does it? Early reports of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s intestine-straighteningly brutal and beautiful new western thriller The Revenant have understandably focused on one quite extraordinary scene. Nineteenth-century fur trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, encounters some bear cubs in an eerily quiet forest and then hears the snuffly-wet sound of their parent behind him, a grownup grizzly who has gained a broadly correct impression of Glass’s overall intentions. The ensuing scene is one of horrifyingly primal violence, a brilliantly conceived CGI-reality cluster, during which I clenched into a whimperingly foetal ball so tight that afterwards I practically had to be rolled out of the cinema auditorium.
The Revenant: first reactions to DiCaprio thriller suggest Oscar potential
The immersion and immediacy of that confrontation reminded me of the moment in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World when moviegoers go to the sensory-enhanced “feelies” and watch a sex scene on a bearskin rug. They feel every bear hair. So could I, and I also felt every droplet of bear spittle, every serration of tooth, and I understood what it feels like when parts of your ribcage are exposed to fresh air and light rain.
Some have described it as a rape scene. It isn’t. But it’s about power, fear and rage, and this moment, quite as much as the human duplicity that follows, is the driving force for this film’s theme, commoner in the movies than real life: revenge, revenge against men and maybe a kind of revenge against nature. Screenwriter Mark L Smith has worked partly from the 2002 novel by Michael Punke, and partly from the real-life story that itself inspired the book: the adventures of Hugh Glass, a Wyoming mountain man who survived a bear-mauling and went on an incredible odyssey to track down the two men who abandoned him to die. This story fictionalises and intensifies his personal circumstances and payback motivation.
Glass has joined other civilian privateers engaged in a US military expedition led by Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) along the Missouri river to establish a lucrative fur-trapping base. Glass and the others are set upon by tribesmen-warriors in an electrifying and terrifying sequence, in which warning cries are silenced by the sibilant arrival of an arrow in the throat. Glass, an experienced tracker, guides the terrified survivors’ retreat across country, where he is mauled by the bear, and two men are detailed and promised extra pay to look after him: young Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy with pop-eyed, truculent malevolence. Once left alone with their charge, they leave Glass to die in agony and figure on returning to base to pick up their extra pay with a fine tale about giving him a Christian burial. But they reckon without Glass’s fanatical will to survive.
Generally, immersive movies enclose, they put you inside, they dunk you down into what it is supposed to feel like. Iñárritu and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki do the opposite: they expose you to the elements. You are out in a piercingly painful cold, under an endless, pitiless sky. This is not an immersion that feels like a sensual surrender; it’s closer to having your skin peeled. The images that the movie conjures are ones of staggering, crystalline beauty: gasp-inducing landscapes and beautifully wrought closeups, such as the leaves in bulbous freezing mounds, and a tiny crescent moon, all unsentimentally rendered. But there is also something hallucinatory and unwholesome about these images, as if hunger and pain has brought Glass to the secularised state of a medieval saint tormented with visions. Poignantly, he mimes shooting distant moose with a tree branch instead of a rifle, and when he suddenly comes across a vast plain full of bison, it’s unclear for a second if he is imagining things. A ruined church looks like a miraculous example of cave painting.
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The very idea of a ‘female friendly film’ is old-fashioned nonsense | Catherine Shoard
The Revenant recalls Ford’s The Searchers and modifies its themes of tribal and sexual transgression and its cruel invocation of scalping; the warriors who attack at first are enraged at the kidnap of a Native American woman, Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o). At other times, Iñárritu appears to be inspired by Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, with the visions of imperial greed and the vast river in full flood – or maybe his documentary Grizzly Man, in which the grim-faced Herzog famously listened on his headphones to the sound of someone being mauled to death. There is arguably something of Altman in the wintry frontier terrain and certainly a Malickian weightlessness in some of Glass’s dreams of his wife. But what is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.
•The Revenant is released in the US on 25 December, in Australia on 7 January and in the UK on 15 January
Note: This review was originally published in December 2015.
What keeps us breathing? What pumps our blood? What is god? These are but a few questions that drift around and empower Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s biographical thriller The Revenant. A cold, visceral, and overwhelming piece of cinema, the follow-up to last year’s Academy Award-winning Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) not only sets a new precedent for the survival genre but may be the strongest Best Picture followup in Oscar history.
Based on Michael Punke’s 2002 novel of the same name, the film follows the true life story of 19th century American explorer and fur trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), who was left for dead by two members of his hunting team following a harrowing encounter with a bear. He didn’t die, though, which is why he must trek over 200 miles through the rugged and uncharted Western frontier to return to his men, specifically those who betrayed him.
The Revenant is a Western, it’s a survival tale, it’s a drama, it’s a historical epic, it’s an existential portrait. It could even be argued as a black comedy — that is, if you want to zero in on the unbelievable and downright outrageous atrocities that Glass must suffer through. Screenwriter Mark L. Smith and co-writer Iñárritu load this sprawling picture with a dense forest of themes that range from humanity’s sheer willpower to the pitfalls of revenge to how we interpret our own spiritualism.
It’s a malleable film in the sense that Glass can represent so many things, and while he’s mostly alone in his journey, he’s often hampered by circumstances and paired against characters that touch on a measure of recurring themes and conflicts. One instance is how the film tussles with the meaning of god. Tom Hardy’s murderous John Fitzgerald regales Will Poulter’s boyish Jim Bridger early on with a story about how a squirrel was god to a past acquaintance of his — simply because it provided the man sustenance. In the same scene, Fitzgerald prods the kid and insists he “ought to be god to [him]” for saving his life.
God is interchangeable to everyone in this film: For Glass, it’s his dead wife and son; for Fitzgerald, it’s a future in Texas; for one stoic Indian father, it’s his lost daughter. The idea is that whatever keeps you breathing, whoever keeps you alive, is what you truly believe in and nothing else matters. It’s an intriguing concept that fuels much of the proceedings, especially as a countermeasure to Glass’ own tortured feelings of revenge, which he’s told is in “the creator’s hands.”
There’s also a subtle digression on the human body itself as a temporary organic vessel for the more timeless soul, and the film ruminates on the belief that our existence goes beyond our own two feet. Midway through, Glass stumbles into a stranded Pawnee Indian, who warns him that his wounds have made his body rotten. Glass obliges, but it’s almost a shrug off, as if to infer that as long as he can breathe, it doesn’t matter what happens to his flesh. The ensuing injuries only insist upon this further.
(Read: Leonardo DiCaprio’s Top 10 Performances)
Yet so does DiCaprio’s grisly showing. Granted, the 40-something actor has invested his body into most of his roles, whether it’s slicing open his hand for Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained or throwing out his back for Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, but he defies all expectations here with one of the most brutally exhausting performances of all time. He’s tossed around like a rag doll, he drags his body across icy terrain and rivers, he sleeps in a horse carcass — hell, he sinks his teeth into a fish he snags straight out of the water.
Nothing comes easy for DiCaprio. Even when he’s doing something as simple and rudimentary as bathing, he’s hunched over naked in freezing temperatures. In fact, his skin never rises above a blueish hue throughout the entire film, which isn’t surprising considering Iñárritu’s well-reported hellish shoots across Canada and Argentina. How Hardy didn’t lose his shit — especially coming off a year that includes the wasteland of Mad Max: Fury Roadand the doubled-down role of Legend — is just remarkable.
The ever-exceptional Hardy, who nails another transformative role, leads a supporting cast that could best be described as, um, masculine. With the exception of a few female Indians, The Revenant surges forward with pelts of testosterone, painting the American West as a dangerous man’s world, where pillaging, scalping, raping, and killing are everyday occurrences. This isn’t the fringe of society; it’s the barren nothingness, where there’s seldom room for humanity, if at all.
Iñárritu wrangles this terror with an amalgamation of touch-and-go one-shots and intimidating close-ups, to the point that we’re able to see men’s breath fog up the screen. It’s an uncomfortable, startling experience that strangles the eyes and ears from beginning to end. The opening is a stressful, gory battle with arrows, bullets, and blades that rivals Spielberg’s retelling of Normandy in Saving Private Ryan. The finale is a taut, bloody massacre on the snowy shores of nowhere.
The Revenant affords such bleak chaos for a number of reasons, but above all because it’s so damn beautiful. As expected, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki dazzles with his use of natural light — the torches, the rolling myst, the sunsets, oh my — and should start writing his acceptance speech for next year’s Academy Awards. (He could also DM Roger Deakins and apologize for trumping his most recent work in Sicario.) Every single shot will leave you shaking your head in awe.
That feeling is certainly elevated by the rousing and gloomy score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto, and The National’s Bryce Dessner. In some moments, the Eno-esque tones feel stripped right out of Michael Mann’s Heat, while in others the sounds become as erratic as Mica Levi’s work on last year’s Under the Skin. Altogether, it’s a haunting collection of tearful strings, glazed synths, and engulfing bass that mirrors the scenery and action at hand with compelling results.
Some might argue this is over-the-top filmmaking, that Iñárritu and DiCaprio are going big for Oscar’s sake, confusing blood and sweat for art and performance, but that’s likely not the goal of this film. Rather, it appears that The Revenant is more invested in shattering today’s style of filmmaking by committing to a brand of realism that’s not exactly unprecedented, but all too often ignored in lieu of conventional (and safer) means. But isn’t that what Iñárritu argued for last year with Birdman? Didn’t he bite his thumb at the plastic blockbusters? Rail against the safe Hollywood system? The Revenant says to hell with all of that.
And perhaps that’s what keeps Iñárritu breathing.
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