Leo's Oscar?

Rating: 9/10 (22 January 2016)

The Revenant hearkens back to many other classic "ImdB top 250" movies while maintaining an element of Innaritu's originality, as well as a narrative complexity which prevents it from straying entirely into tired cliché in most moments. Amazing visuals and performances coupled with intense action will keep you on the edge of your seat throughout it's entire 2 and a half hour run time.
For example, the opening battle sequence cliché hasn't been done this well or with such furor outside of may be Saving Private Ryan. The wonderful intermittent landscape shots (ruthless mother nature playing the role of antagonist just as vehemently as Tom Hardy's character, and is thusly afforded plenty of screen time) reminded me at times of similar shots in Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring, especially when the group of fur traders are trekking across snow-covered mountain tops. Innaritu even seemed to take inspiration from "The Empire Strikes Back" as the main character seeks refuge from a snowstorm by cutting open the carcass of a dead animal. Overall the movie reminded me the most of Gladiator throughout, a man seeking revenge on those who murdered his family and left him for dead. It's not a massive spoiler to say the movie even ends with a similar shot as Ridley Scott's movie, of the main character looking at a dream image of his deceased love.
Even though if you were harsh you might say Innarritu is recycling classic tropes, I think the Revenant matches up in terms of quality to most of the movies I have just mentioned, and Innaritu does manage to add his own original touch. Even though there aren't any 4th-wall-breaking elements as in Birdman, the spiritual elements in the dream/fantasy sequences gel nicely with the film's undertone of portraying nature as a godly and at times even supernatural force. A force that the Natives as well as Hugh Glass have learned to cope with. Glass's affinity towards nature and by extension the Natives is also represented by his relationship with his Pawnee son by a deceased Pawnee woman. This is juxtaposed with a scene where a French fur trader literally rapes a Native woman whom Glass ends up rescuing. Even though these two points quite obviously present an anti-colonialist narrative we have all seen before, the Native American subplot was presented with enough moral ambiguity throughout to keep me interested. The natives themselves were capable of immense cruelty at times, but at the end the only true villains were Tom Hardy's Fitzgerald...and the Bear.
If I have to justify docking a point it's because the movie did stretch my disbelief a bit on how many improbable events Hugh Glass actually managed to survive in a row, despite it being "based on" a true story and all that. I don't want to enter into excessive spoiler territory but the one situation that had me rolling my eyes a bit was when he rode his horse off a cliff at the exact spot he needed to in order to have a tree break his fall. All this in order to avoid being shot to death by angry Natives. Literally he found the only way to survive that situation through pure luck i.e. it will only happen in the movies. I think Innaritu may be could've come up with a better way to kill off the horse so that Leo could cut it open sleep in it Han Solo style?