A beautiful, brutal, violent, intense Western that I just love!

Rating: 10/10 (19 January 2016)

Following Birdman, although Alejandro G. Inarritu had been developing this project long before that film, this film is a step back in joking and light-heartedness and a step up in white-knuckle fury.
I do love this movie, but given the movie does have some very minor problems, I'll just quickly cover them all.
1. The script, whilst it isn't god-awful and the crew do amazing things with the film despite it, it is easily the weakest part of the film. Unlike Birdman, where whatever got shot got ended up in the movie, this movie is shot a bit more conventionally with edits and the like, so the script just isn't as tight. 2. Tom Hardy's accent, even by his standards, takes a lot of effort to understand. He's got the diction and the enunciation of a heavy Texan down to a tee but he rushes it sometimes and it is a little distracting. 3. Hugh Glass's dreams can get very weird and often pretentious. Personally, I like a little bit of pretentiousness, but you possibly won't. Just a friendly warning than an outright flaw.
Alright, now I've done this, time to gush about the film: The direction is amazing - the angles we see are insane, and when the movie does eventually mix with CGI for the animals, notably the bear attack, I'm amazed with how real it actually looks. The Cinematography is f---ing AMAZING! I remember making a film in Abbey Wood, and struggling to get a good shot in decent weather, and so how they got a lot of these beautifully framed shots I'll never know. Every new shot of the film, I just kept asking "how did they do that?", and even the scenes of unbelievable violence like the bear attack or the fights with the Indians look so gorgeous. The acting of the four main players is great - the four main players are Will Mellor playing the young Jim Bridger, Domhall Gleeson as Captain Andrew Henry, Tom Hardy playing the antagonistic John Fitzgerald and obviously Leonardo DiCaprio playing the fiercely resistant and resourceful Hugh Glass. Will Mellor and Domhall Gleeson, in spite of being more supporting players, do get affective moments when they are operating in moments of emotional and physical discomfort and totally selling it. And whilst I criticised his voice, Tom Hardy's first Oscar-nomination for his acting is well deserved - his body language and intent with the eyes is totally spot-on. Fitzgerald is a character who has to be sold as real because moments of deeper reason and nuance are sold off over the course of the movie, but Hardy creates those moments of flipping it around - we see him, after the initial attack by the Indians berating Glass and his half-Indian son and saying incredibly vicious things and you begin to hate him, then he pulls back his cap and reveals a big bald patch, from where Indians had scalped him and pulls a look of total anger. Immediately perception is flipped.
In fact, Hardy and DiCaprio are playing really different to the kind of characters they usually do; DiCaprio tends to fly best when he's playing very dialogue heavy parts like Jordan Belfort, and Hardy is very, VERY much a physical, body language type of performance. Here's it's flipped, and Tom Hardy is given a majority of the dialogue and Leo gets to work with very little and give a performance that is so visceral and tortured that it's something almost beautiful; you are totally behind him as he makes his long as hell journey back home. This will be his Oscar winning performance, I'm sure of it: a performance that is genuinely brilliant and not at all bait to boot.
This movie is brilliant, but it is brutal, especially with that bear attack scene: it's a continuous 5 minute shot of a man getting the hell beaten out of him, and this bear is not holding back. This bear does pretty much everything conceivable to him, and it's a groundbreaking piece of Acting, Animation, Direction, Cinematography and Sound Design that needs to be seen in Theatres. Right now; go see it!