Savage.

Rating: 8/10 (10 February 2016)

The Revenant is a really well made film. Almost every shot is flawless, the acting is brilliant, the dialogue is great - you have to start nitpicking to find things to critique. Yes, you can see that they have used CGI a couple of times, but it still works really well. The movie is a bit long, but I never lost interest in it.
The story is at its surface a classical western, almost. Revenge, kinship, man versus nature, and so on. To me, the most interesting part about the movie was how it explored man as animals. You see the settlers looking at the natives as savages, and you also see the settlers acting like savages in front of the natives. If anything, this movie shows how cruel life can be, and how bad circumstances can bring out the worst in people. On the surface, there is a "good" and an "evil" side of this story, and the villain of the story is at times cruel. But at the heart of the conflict is the will to survive, at any cost. Humans are animals. The natives know this, and thus are more in peace with the horrible conditions. The settlers struggle with this, and thus turn into savages.