2½ hours of self torture - for what?

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2015)

There is nothing wrong with the film. The acting is perfectly natural all the way, so natural, that you can't understand what almost anyone is saying for their mumbling in their shaggy beards, especially the main crook (Tom Hardy), who isn't credible in his unmotivated evil, and of course everything goes constantly wrong. They do everything they shouldn't, go wandering alone in a dark forest when there are bears around and you can even hear their cubs - these bear hunters couldn't be unaware that there must be a worried bear mother near by when she smells a human hunter close to her cubs. Of course, the bear attack triggers the drama, without which there would be none; but the greatest folly is in the end, when the two good men go a-hunting for a desperate murderer in the wilderness and they split up. How could they be so dumb? Sorry, it's a weak story with no psychology mainly made up for its effects, and of course, these are marvellous, the main prize going to the fantastic photography of the wilderness in the awesome landscape scenes, and here you could actually speak of poetry, but that's about all. They say it was all shot without any artificial light, which of course adds to the intriguing atmosphere of the nocturnal scenes, and the whole enterprise of shooting such a film under sinister conditions in the wilderness deserves much credit. At best some of the wilderness scenes succeed in creating some "Call of the Wild"-ecstasy, especially the most spectacular of them all with the buffaloes. But the story is such, that you feel rather inclined to take sides with the Indians and the bears than with these villains causing nothing but mischief in the wilderness and even failing with that, while the original Richard Harris-John Huston film from 1971, which I haven't seen yet, could be expected to be better.
You could blame the flaws of the story, which appears to be founded on fact way up in the Dakota wilderness in the 1820s among Sioux and Pawnees, on the necessity of the truthfulness of naturalism, people could actually be this beastly, and if they are beastly they are usually dumb as well, so let's make allowances for that - realism in absurdum, which though only makes you take the stronger sides with the Indians and the bears. One final question mark - even an Indian would in the end feel motivated to do something for the trapper that after all saved the life of his daughter, which she couldn't be unaware of, when she exits with her father with no more than a look.