Dissonance

Rating: 5/10 (11 January 2016)

This was one of the first movies that I've gone to see in theaters in a very long time. It is too bad that the experience left me dissatisfied.
I am a natural skeptic, and I think that this skepticism is what kept me from enjoying the movie. I can accept plot holes, inconsistencies, and the hero escaping unending deathlike scenarios in your average over the top action movie, but in a movie that was filmed in such a realistic way and touted to be based on a true story, these types of things really bother me.
The beginning of the movie had me hooked. The quite stalk transitions into one of the most epic battle scenes that I've ever seen. It was truly awesome. The first hints of highly exaggerated drama, and where the experience turned sour for me, came with the bear attack. This was a scene that most people loved, but it was the first scene that tore me out of the movie and into the realm of criticism.
For starters, this movie is beautifully filmed, and adding CGI, even animation this good, really took me out of the story. The bear mauling also seemed highly exaggerated. There were literally minutes of the bear tossing DiCaprio around and biting and shaking every inch of his body. I'm sorry, but no one could survive something like that from an animal that large. Even if he wasn't dead immediately every bone in his body would have been broken and he would have been torn to shreds and bled out in minutes.
The seasons/landscape in the movie also seems highly inconsistent, or maybe I just don't understand the geography/time-line that they were traveling through, but they go from wooded forests with little to no snow to frozen tundra with nothing around them, and then back and forth, and I just did not understand where the different characters were at any given moment.
I love how this movie was filmed, but if you are going to go through all of the hassle to get untouched nature scenes in real light and tell a tale based on a true story, why not make sure that there aren't glaring inconsistencies and truly unsurvivable moments for the protagonist. Here are some more that I noticed: - Multiple gun shots from muzzle loading rifles/pistols without reloading. In any other movie this wouldn't bother me/I wouldn't notice, but really you only have one shot before you have to spend 30-60 seconds reloading one of those things. This kind of inaccuracy was really glaring to me.

DiCaprio ate raw meat, and dove into freezing water for his role in this movie, but he couldn't start a fire with flint? It seemed fairly obvious by the way the scene was filmed that the fire was started off screen by someone else. I would think that a movie trying to realistically portray the struggle to survive would at least try to show how hard it would be to really start a fire with flint. If DiCaprio was willing to undergo the other struggles of survival, why wasn't he able/willing to learn to start a fire? - DiCaprio struggles out of a freezing cold river and can barely move, cut, next scene he has a roaring fire but there are barely any usable fire materials in sight. How did he build a fire? - What is with Tom Hardy's accent? I appreciate his dedication to the role, but where is this accent from? I had a similar problem with his accent in Lawless. He is consistent with it throughout the movie, but is it just a made up accent, or is it based off of how some people talk/talked in real life? If it is I certainly haven't heard it before.

DiCaprio's leg was severely broken and we never see it set. When/How did his bones magically set themselves and heal? Especially since he doesn't have a source of food throughout most of the movie.

When they find out DiCaprio is somewhere outside of the fort they send a party of 20-30 people out to look for him, but when a guy steals all of the money out of the fort safe they only send a party of two? - Why all the scenes with the dead wife? He didn't even have a wife in real life, and I don't think any of the scenes added anything of worth to the movie.

Reading through other reviews it sounds like the story in the movie isn't even close to the story in the book. I really hate when they say based on a true story, but it doesn't even come close. What am I supposed to believe? In the end I just choose to believe none of it, which completely defeats the purpose of it being based on a true story in the first place.

Despite all of the things that I disliked about the movie, there were a couple of redeeming scenes. In particular I enjoyed the beginning battle scene, and I think it is something that everyone should see. I also loved the primal scene, where two starving strangers are staring each other down while eating the raw meat of a fresh kill. This scene along with the following scene where they are catching snow out of the sky in their mouths were two of my favorites.