One of the most beautiful films about ugliness I have ever seen

Rating: 10/10 (22 December 2015)

This is the best film of 2015 by about 200 miles, and the best frontier epic I've seen in 25 years. It isn't dissimilar to 1990's Dances With Wolves, but The Revenant is a story that actually happened (or close to it) and the minor liberties taken with the source all make sense when you read about the saga as it was documented, and are totally justified when you see the end result.
Tom Hardy is having quite a year. Mad Max: Fury Road was the best film I had seen this year until this one came along, and despite how good he was as the lead/hero, his portrayal of a totally corruptible villain is far better, and is the best performance in the movie in my opinion.
Fortunately for DiCaprio, Hardy isn't competing with him as the lead actor here and while Hardy's performance is extremely dialog-driven, Leo's is the exact opposite. Within the first half-hour he's almost entirely lost the use of his voice and spends the remaining 2 hours illustrating that acting is as much about line delivery as about facial expression and body language.
A couple of the more minor casting and crewing decisions seemed strange when I first read about them, particularly Domnhall Gleeson in the role of the Army Captain and Ryuichi Sakamoto's appointment to create the score. I've never seen Gleeson play any masculine characters in a convincing fashion but he does it extremely well here, and although Sakamoto created two outstanding film scores for 'Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence' and 'The Last Emperor' they were both in the mid 1980's. He's worked with Inarritu before but this is his best work since he won the academy award in 1987 and the best film score I've heard all year. He had some assistance with this one, which seems to be a roadblock to his getting a nomination for this movie, which is a shame.
On the topic of awards, DiCaprio and Hardy certainly deserve their probable nominations, but I think The Revenant has a better chance at snagging the two sound design Oscars (particularly the one for sound mixing) and the award for best cinematography. The latter is, for me, the biggest lock of the year in a year where many will be rooting for DiCaprio as much during awards season as they do for his character in the film.
Emmanuel Lubezki has again delivered the most beautiful film of the year, and has included quite a few of his usual impressive camera tricks. Visually and thematically The Revenant evokes 2005's The New World, and in addition to the same amazing imagery he captured in that film, this one is a technical jaw-dropper. There are several long-take action scenes that owe as much of their impact to the visual effects and choreography teams as they do to Lubezki's camera but he's the one who brings it all together. To win the Oscar again would be his third win in a row and provide some tangible support for my feeling that he's the greatest film photographer in the world and possibly the best one ever. No one has won the award more than four times and the two men who did win four took an average fourteen nominations to get there. Lubezki has two wins from just seven nominations in a relatively short 32-year career behind the lens.
The Revenant is the type of movie that I had to take notes for because by the time the credits rolled I had forgotten at least a couple of the technical puzzle-pieces that combined to make it so great. Nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Makeup and Best Editing would all be deserved in addition to those mentioned above. I would not be surprised to see the film enter February with as many as 10 Oscar nominations. The combined efforts of about a half dozen of the most talented artists and technicians in the business are at play here. 10 out of 10 starts; one of the most beautiful films about ugliness you'll ever see.