Surprisingly mediocre and some bad lens choices.

Rating: 6/10 (17 August 2019)

I've heard nothing but good things about The Revenant, especially regarding the cinematography. However, upon watching it, I was shocked by some of the terrible wide-angle lens choices. This lead a number of the scenes having distortion which completely pulled me out of the scenes. This is a shame, because other than that the camera work was solid. I usually wouldn't nitpick about something so small but, unfortunately, other than the visual aspect of the film, it didn't have much else going on.
Leo did a wonderful job, as did the rest of the cast, but it wasn't enough to hold my interest through the two and a half hour run-time. This isn't because I don't like slowly paced films about people, I do, I just found the story a little simple for such a long run-time. I have no problem with a two and a half hour character driven film, but it needs some complexity to justify it. Apologies to the filmmakers, but I don't find a man crawling and stumbling around the woods for over an hour to be especially gripping storytelling. The only reason I can think of for this film being as needlessly long as it was, was to show off the stunning landscapes in which it was filmed.
Had the movie been shorter, it would have been much better. There were some scenes, one in particular with a bear, that dragged on so absurdly long that it could pass for a parody of itself.
The Revenant is neither a spectacular film nor a horrible film, it's fine. Just fine. Nothing more, nothing less. If you're looking for an interesting character driven drama, check out something like Nightcrawler instead.