Magnanimous Vision, Brilliantly Realized (minor spoiler)

Rating: 10/10 (12 January 2016)

Beautiful. Captivating. Awe-inspiring.
I could fill the page with adjectives, but unfortunately none can characterize The Revenant's underlying ethos. Instead, I put forth my best effort to string together the most fitting collection of words I can find.
Set in North America during the mid 1800s, you are immediately taken back by the gorgeous shots of an immense wilderness. One particular pan starts at the forest floor and slowly meanders up, passing through multiple vantage points. The progression grasps our attention and, spellbound, we gasp in wonder, lost in the scenery, until an arrow whizzes across our view and strikes the tree next to us. Ambush. Indians. Our momentary shock transforms to adrenaline: we are not watching a film; we are in the film. It is perception with pathos, instinctual prowess, an experience intensely personal, that the camera shots from The Revenant capture. Whether we join DiCaprio helplessly lying on his back mauled by a bear, a member of his company, young and afraid, listening to the antagonist justify his actions, or the vast, indifferent omniscience of Nature constantly dwarfing its inhabitants, the cinematography employs a novel, awe-inspiring use of first-person perspective. And director Alejandro González Iñárritu refuses to let us go until we see the deepest, most primal part of ourselves.
As with all great works of art, it ends accusingly, accosting us with the hard hitting questions we prefer to ignore most of our life. Why am I here? Who am I? What do I live for? At the end of the film, we realize that The Revenant perhaps does not refer to Hugh Glass, the protagonist and fur trader on the cusp of obscurity, but rather each individual in the audience, renewed with a catharsis that beckons introspection. Questions old as humanity resurface as we follow the pioneer whose quest for vengeance disguises, albeit poorly, the greater narrative of survival in a hostile, primeval Continent. Some decry the film's apathetic treatment of the protagonist's quest. Indeed, ego would have that the individual be the center of attention, especially in a fantastic tall tale of an American folk hero using self-willed determination to achieve his ends. But that's not what speaks here. A gigantic female bear decidedly mounts our mighty, masculine hero, clambers to the edge of the camera shot, then decides she wants seconds and climbs back on top of our broken, emasculated adventurer. Later, a Bison herd peppers the screen as a glistening sunrise floods the horizon. Nowhere in sight is that supposedly larger-than-life hero. Certainly, this is an affront to the nation whose ideology prides itself upon self-efficacy, where one's individual efforts correlate with success. Where the American dream is, at its essence, an ego-centric one. How dare this foreign director bastardize a classic American fable with anachronistic inklings of modernism. Perhaps it is this stark apathy towards the protagonist and his story that strikes a discordant chord in those who decry the surface level narrative. Your ego leaves the theater starved, not satiated. However, if you can forego the importance of plot, particularly one that depends upon a definitive, predictable, and moral resolution, as well as a fixation on character, given Glass's archetypal, primitive presentation (decidedly more pessimistic critics use the term "flat"), you will leave the film noticeably jarred, not because it offers explicit philosophical intricacy, but rather by bringing out the internal, primordial conflicts that threaten our psyche.
It accomplishes this by mirroring our own instinctual tendencies. Spirituality manifests itself through underlying trauma. Narrative manifests itself through underlying absurdity. This particular history of an insignificant retributive mountain-man is categorically irrelevant, no different from any other organism willed to survive. As the first-person camera shots travel indiscriminately across perspectives, it becomes clear that nature treats all beings with equal disinterest, regarding neither nation, color, or species. It fills the vast wilderness with fantastic works of conception, all the while indifferent to the particular particles of mortal sentience that, for a brief time, populate it. This revelation that occurs during or after the film causes us to revisit the fundamental reasons we give ourselves for living. The Revenant, at its core, touches our soul. It is an exercise in existentialism, an intriguing infusion of modernism into American folk lore, and a captivating tribute to those that sacrificed everything so we could watch their struggles in high definition whilst sitting safely on plushy, cushioned chairs, munching on excessively buttered popcorn, and gulping down artificial concoctions of sugar-infused carbonation. It is, in short, the best film in recent memory: one that transcends the flimsy, banal metrics of the era, whether manifested as a fickle, five-star meter on IMDb, a self-gratifying awards show, or a snobby film critic. Don't let these red herrings fool you, The Revenant is a wonderful work of art. And, as they tend to do, you will find yourself more appreciative, perhaps more aware too, of the life you've been given, the others that are in it, and the world that conceived it. But only if you choose to put the ego away for a brief few hours, engaging honestly with and immersing yourself in another's beautiful, grandiose vision. The Revenant serves us, to quote Fitzgerald's closing lines of Gatsby, "a transitory enchanted momentan aesthetic contemplationneither understood nor desiredsomething commensurate to" our "capacity for wonder".