Fascinating movie, another smash hit for Inarritu

Rating: 9/10 (7 January 2016)

Wow, what a roll Alejandro González Iñárritu is on! After his Oscar-winning hit of Birdman, he now returns with a stellar picture with The Revenant. I also liked 21 Grams and Babel, and together with his two latest films he really shows what a breadth he has, I definitely rank him as one of the strongest film-makers we have.
The Revenant impresses for many reasons. Technically, it is a masterpiece. The audience will recognise the fluid, almost levitating cinematography from Birdman but instead of the more confined spaces of a Broadway Theatre, The Revenant brilliantly cuts between close-up shots of battles between soldiers and Native Americans and wide-panorama shots of great American landscapes, equally beautiful and brutal for "The Revenant" - Glass played by Leonardo Di Caprio. Di Caprio delivers one of the strongest performances of an already strong career, showing that his versatility as an actor is on par with the greatest as he delivers a gritty and strenuous physical performance.
SPOILERS WILL FOLLOW But my strongest take-away from this piece is not its technical virtuosity, but its humanistic theme. One of the main topics of The Revenant is survival and perseverance against all odds. In this sense it is not unsimilar to this year's The Martian, where a man is left for dead, survives and must go to extraordinary lengths to make his way back. The other theme, of course absent in The Martian, is about revenge and justice. What really resonated with me was the ending and in my interpretation, how it shows the difference between achieving justice and having revenge. I found the climactic scene very powerful, when Glass finally has the opportunity to have the revenge he literally has crawled from the grave to exert, but realises that his son won't be brought back by killing his killer and that only God can be Fitzgerald's final judge. As a viewer, we feel that Glass has made the morally right decision, and we are rewarded with what has to be poetic justice as we see that the Indian girl that Glass inadvertently but compassionately has rescued from captivity has been reunited with her tribe and we know that Fitzgerald drifts away to his final destiny in the river. Glass doesn't know that the tribe has been travelling as far as he has to find her, but as viewers we see that at least in fiction, true justice is possible, and this of course is the beauty of fiction. This theme of the value of revenge also echoes Inarritu's 21 Grams where a women also is obsessed with revenge.
On another level, I also view this movie as commentary about the historic period and issues it touches - the colonialization of North America and the Native Americans, a conflict that I still believe lingers in the American psyche. Glass symbolises a man who has lived in peace and in mutual acceptance with Natives, in contrast to Fitzgerald, once near-scalped, ever-greedy and with the attitude that "they're all savages". In this movie, Glass is the protagonist and Fitzgerald the antagonist, but in reality, which camp's perspective actually won?
In the end, I did rate this movie 8 out of 10. Why not 9 or 10? I did feel that the many parts that depicts Glass's struggle and way back were a bit unnecessary and repetitive. While Leo's performance certainly is admirable, it's maybe not as multifaceted as one could hope, it is basically only hardship, love for his son and revenge, not much more. My strongest concern is that I don't think its theme of survival against the odds, which takes up the biggest part of the movie, is as strong as its theme about revenge and justice. This meant that there were stretches of the movie where I felt more reaction than emotion, reaction to gore or Glass's bad luck, rather than true, deep emotion. All in all, I still think it is a very good movie and would recommend anyone to see it, given that they aren't sensitive to blood and violence.