What for?

Rating: 6/10 (13 March 2017)

Yet another (3-) Academy Award-winning effort not really seeming to deserve all the praise, and certainly not worth all the fuss.
There are repeated examples of arrogance and disdain for the audience on display here from the inexplicably-Oscar-winning Director Alejandro Inarritu, as well as co-writer Mark L. Smith, and that begins with the decision to adopt straight the title Michael Punke chose for his 2002 novel. No, a "revenant" is not somebody seeking revenge, but is a kind of an unkillable zombie figure, returned but no longer really alive, which presumably fits rather well with the behaviour of our (real-life-historical-figure) hero Hugh Class (1783-1833), as played by an Oscar-winning Leonardo DiCaprio.
If there is a message to this film it is that life in the 1820s wilderness of North America was incredibly rough and tough...
There, I've said it, and it took me one sentence. In the film, the makers devote the best part of two and a half hours to hammering this well-known message home to us, in the process allowing Leo to rasp, groan, moan, gasp, whine and creak at least a thousand times. Other cast members have it far from easy also, but most matter little here compared with the star.
Intriguingly, though, when Glass first enters a river in spate formed by melting snow and ice he for once does not gasp at all...
I write "wilderness of North America", because it is several hours before we finally hear that our story takes place somewhere near the Yellowstone River, and that narrows things down to North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. It finishes at Fort Kiowa which is in turn in South Dakota.
I only know it is the 1820s because I read it online, while the makers do not bother to tell us this, nor do they bother with much scene-setting, for example to explain why somebody not obviously in uniform is referred to as "Captain" and appears to be in a position to give military-style orders. There are French-speakers and Brits out there, but we're not sure how or why. All are fur-trappers, and in fact Wikipedia tells us readily enough that Glass was part of General Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company expedition of 1823, which was indeed attacked by Arikara/Ree people native to North Dakota by that time close to extinction. The sad truth is that this genuine story seems far more interesting than the film, which does indeed push Glass's real-life survival so far that it regularly looks implausible, even though it did actually happen.
Art refusing to imitate life, as it were...
The makers' determination to press home the "incredibly tough" conditions referred to above is so strong that they refuse to let the sun shine for about 95% of the film, with all being white or dull grey, or in the twilight/dark or in blizzards. This is not possible in real life (and all the more so when snow at times seems to be melting), but since there are various dark and deceitful deeds afoot from the human cast (to say nothing of dangerous animals), we must watch a dowdy film that is heavy on the eye, despite being set in places that - for all their dangers and discomforts - are rightly known for their incredible beauty. Emmanuel Lubezki got a cinematography Oscar for his work here, and there ARE some fine shots of rivers flowing as and where they want to, but I can get those on a nature film (in which, as a bonus, the sun is allowed to shine from time to time).
On the (futher) minus side, "The Revenant" features a number of moments of - rather incomprehensible and not properly pursued - Native American spiritual elements. Then there are bison herds on the move with wolves waiting to pick off the weak and various more-or-less intriguing mountain-men "survival tips"; but a great many of these (indeed far more) could be enjoyed (in the truest sense of that word) in, for example, "Dances with Wolves" a film with very serious themes (from 1863) and plenty of awfully negative behaviour on display, but one which did not fear depicting beauty ... and sunshine, and did have its story to tell. The same could really be said of "True Grit" - one heck of a story probably set in the 1840s, and even "The Searchers" (again hugely strong on plot and acting) - which depicted events from 1868.
Perhaps (Presumably?) those behind "The Revenant" would regard the above films as examples of hopelessly old-fashioned and clichéd beginning-middle-end storytelling, unlike their own piece, which pretty much jumps into existence out of the void with its large-scale Indian attack, and then proceeds with a "survival and revenge" plot against a background that has scarcely been set up at all, and with characters that we must perforce "catch up with" having never been introduced...
While I would certainly not dismiss my time spent with "The Revenant" as wasted, and cannot therefore suggest to anyone that they not give it a try, I do go away from it with a sense of being far, far less enlightened or elevated (let alone entertained) than I ought to have been, especially in the case of a film that the Academy clearly adored!