Extremely bleak, exceedingly brutal & exceptionally cold-blooded, The Revenant is that savage beast that charges at you with relentless aggression, mauls you from head to toe without mercy, and leaves you utterly bruised, broken & helpless in the freezing cold of a harsh surrounding. Absolutely uncompromising with its content, unflinchingly raw in its depiction, and pushing its cast & crew to their limit, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s latest is one of the most harrowing films ever made.
While traveling back to their village after an attack on their camp — the attack being of course filmed in grand, sweeping takes by Emmanuel Lubezki who will most likely make history at this year’s Academy Awards — Hugh Glass, an American fur-trapper and frontiersman in the early 1800s, wanders off from the rest of his men and finds himself alone in the woods when he’s brutally ripped to literal-shreds-of-flesh by a grizzly bear in one of the most abrasively horrifying man vs. nature scenes I’ve ever seen in film (best CGI ever?).
His fellow clansmen (including a surprisingly good Will Poulter, a decent Domhnall Gleeson, and a once again brilliant Tom Hardy) quickly find Glass and consider him dead, or if not completely dead then close enough. Their journey continues, but Glass’ ends right there.…Or that’s what was supposed to happen.
What follows is the several-week-long journey of revenge that this broken man takes to hopefully, one day, find his vengeance. And boy does he gets put through it all, let me tell you. (“The Revenant or: And You Thought YOU Had a Bad Week”)
The amount of filmmaking craft that’s present at every second of the film is enough for you to have a sensory overload. Visually you will be stunned at every second. There simply is no weak or lesser shot in the film. In the attack on their land towards the beginning of the film, the camera spins, soars, and creeps across the land in one glorious take as arrows smash into the trunks of trees and tear through the faces of men, all made that much more immersive by the incredible sound design. And as far as production design, it might as well have been filmed in the early 1800s. Stunning doesn’t even begin to describe it.
The development of these multi-faceted characters comes across as factually grounded and believable in the context of the story. Without fail or falter, “The Revenant” beautifully presents to us the complex world we live in today. Every being has a story, everyone has a good side and a bad side. There’s no plain evil just like there’s no plain good (this isn’t Marvel), and subconsciously as an audience, you root for everyone, which makes each bone that’s snapped, arrow shot and bullet fired, that much more painful to endure.
It’s a tough, draining, long ride. It’s a draining, long ride. It’s a long ride. It’s long. But never outdone by its length. I never felt a sense of wandering in the film. besides the brief flashbacks (which didn’t add much to me) everything felt it needed to be in the movie.
On an overall scale, The Revenant is another gritty, unrelenting & audacious piece of filmmaking from Alejandro G. Iñárritu that finds the director in sublime form and also happens to be his most direct & accessible film to date. Definitely not for the easily distressed, this thrilling story of survival & retribution is destined to upset many viewers with its graphic nature of storytelling but for those who can manage to stay on board, it will be rewarding on more levels than one. Marking another artistic high for both Iñárritu & Lubezki and catapulted to a greater level by DiCaprio’s extraordinary performance, The Revenant is the best film of 2015 i’ve seen and certainly one of the proudest in the careers of its cast & crew. Strongly recommended.
*ddileo 