Beauty is only skin deep

Rating: 5/10 (24 January 2016)

Everybody loves this picture. They praise the looks of it. And indeed, it looks beyond awesome. From a technical point of view, it is nothing short of flawless. But unfortunately, beauty is only skin deep, and if one manages to look past the the cinematography, he/she will find that the story is nothing special, in fact, compared to the praise this movie is receiving, it feels like it is a fraud. Basically it is the journey of DiCaprios character from near death to a moment of revenge, but if you take into account what his character goes trough, he should be dead already from exposure or pneumonia half way trough, instead, amongst other things, he rides a horse off a cliff and falls hundreds of feet without getting a new scratch next to the scars made by a bear. Also, the plenitude of nature shots which are there to pound in the viewers the severity of the heroes situation, despite being beautiful, are so excessive that a good one hour of the 156 minutes runtime of this movie could have been cut out without any actual loss to the story. The director is also pushing the boundaries with the flashbacks and hallucination scenes just for the sake of back story and motivational exposition. Given the depth (or lack there of) of the story, the movie should have been around 90 minutes flat instead of an almost 3 hour long epic. Honestly, when I was not bored by the national geography shots, I was hating this movie with a passion. I found it to be pretentious, hollow, with badly written characters and way too long for its own good. Also, in about 2-3 years of time, nobody is going to talk about this movie unless the topic is not the fact that DiCaprio still did not received an Oscar yet. Quite frankly, I cannot imagine anybody to want to re-watch this movie again given its length unless he/she is glutton for punishment. I could go on and on about why I find this movie to be soo bad, but it would become a mindless rant and I do not like that. It is basically the posh version of Avatar. I am just wondering when will people see this?