Chilling

Rating: 8/10 (7 January 2016)

For those of you looking for an action movie, move along. It's another artsy movie from Alejandro Gonzalez-Innaritu. For anyone wondering, it's not as good as Birdman, but I think that was going to be a given. What is quite surprising, and most incredible about this movie, is Leonardo DiCaprio. He's given one earth-shattering performance after another, and just when you think you've seen it all, he appears in this. He just tortures himself. Crawling in the snow with his bare fingers, chowing down on bloody deer meat, sleeping inside a warm horse like a Tauntaun. He's simply fantastic. If he doesn't win the Oscar this year, he'll never win one.
The other standout is the cinematography. It's the best of it's kind I've seen since "There Will Be Blood". Every scene looked absolutely breathtaking. Without question, Chivo is the best cinematographer working in the business today. As long as he keeps shooting movies, everyone needs to step aside and let him show us all how it's done.
Among all this praise, I don't think it's a perfect movie. It's biggest flaw is the casting of Tom Hardy. We've all been hearing praise for his performance, and at times, he does do a good job. But he sounds exactly the same as he did in Lawless. It's the same voice. It's probably the same voice for Bane too, but we won't be able to ever know for sure behind the mask. That garbled, bullfrog.. yeah, try something else next time, Tom. Also, I kind of would have liked the movie to do without the stereotypical Native American side characters. I was having "Dances with Wolves" flashbacks. Plus, it didn't really advance the main story, other than the fact that those were people who the American's were fighting at that time. Then again, i've never read the actual story.. but even if I did, I think that Glass's journey was far more interesting cinematically.