A gorgeous and well-acted movie with weaknesses.

Rating: 9/10 (13 January 2019)

19 January 2016. Leonardo deCaprio like his role as Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004) shows that he understands suffering well as a mountain man in Revenant. Director Alejandro Inarritu incorporates a visceral cinematography style as found in Saving Private Ryan (1998) into his own visual aspect of men battling each other and seems to take advantage of the use of sharp artistic images along with crisp sound effects that made Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) so powerful and realistic. Using haunting and powerful strains of music that at times echo Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, Inarritu enhances the movie's lengthy edits without dialogue. Revenant has many similarities to another stunning survival movie, Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2006) and the epic western, Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves that won best movie Oscars twenty-five years ago.
Yet unlike more personally and sustain intensity of the true to life survival film, Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void (2003, there are plot weaknesses throughout the movie that mildly detract from the movie's rhythm and authenticity. There is a scene beautifully shot from high above a river and yet realistically the actual path to the river seems impossibly difficult to navigate as that point in the movie. There isn't any actual shot of the use of flint in making an actual fire. And likely another in an extremely cold river would have died within minutes of hypothermia. The death scene of a single Indian seems unlikely when the white man survives nearby. And any person trying to avoid being tracked is also a fool to walk in a visually stunning scene in the middle of an open and barren now field. Finally it is unlikely a manhunt as choreographed in The Revenant would have unfolded so blatantly easily as it did.
A major problem with this movie is how the director pushes the limits of artistic presentation over the storyline. Sean Penn's survival movie, Into The Wild (2007) is a good example where the director's fantastic camera eye for beauty begins to transform into the foreground of the movie's plot, and here in The Revenant falling into a tree scene is one glaring example of overkill towards unbelievability. The last problem with this movie is its ending which is overly extended and the Indian women's character development and role in the movie is severely minimized to the point that a most poignant redemption ending is lost and overlooked.
The Revenant deserves best acting, cinematographic awards, but it can't quite offer the completeness for best movie.