A well-made beautiful movie

Rating: 9/10 (23 March 2016)

Finally Leonardo Dicaprio wins an award for Best Actor in Oscars and the Golden Globe Award for best actor. After watching this movie, I realized that this movie had great cinematography. Alejandro González Iñárritu definitely made the visuals of this movie very pleasing for the audience's eyes! Alejandro definitely is a unique director and just like what Dicaprio said, this movie was really one of a kind.
This historical/survival/revenge drama was taken place in the Canadian wilderness and according to Alejandro, it was extremely difficult to shoot this film because the cast and crew had been filming it for 6 months. You might wonder why it took so long to finish filming for this movie, but that's because the director decided to use all natural light. No wonder the visuals were beautiful! In addition, I really liked how the director decided to portray the transitions. In most of the scenes, the transitions would just show the mountains, trees, river, etc. and showed nature's pristine beauty. Also just like Birdman, there was this one particular scene I vividly remember and it was when Dicaprio was trying to hide from the Native Amecans and the camera applied the 180 Degree Rule, and the camera spun around 180 degrees.
Instead of going on describing how awesome the visuals are, I also want to talk about the acting. The acting was no doubt really good. Leonardo Dicaprio did well, but Tom Hardy, Will Poulter, and Dohmnall Gleeson's acting was incredible too. You know that the movie is good when everyone's acting is phenomenal.
Moreover, Dicaprio doesn't have that much line, but you can feel his emotions through his breathing. As you can tell, this movie is more of a kinesthetic type sort of movie. You can literally feel how Dicaprio felt every time he was gasping for air. It was filled with anger, agony, and sadness. It was painful to watch because the acting felt so realistic. Even at one point, the camera lens were filled with Dicaprio's mouth mist, which I thought was really cool.
The movie was gory, but it felt different compared to Saw and other thriller-gory movies. One of the most memorable scene was the bear scene. Dicaprio gets brutally attacked by a bear and gets nearly killed. They show all the scratch and bite marks and it looks so painful. In addition, there was this scene when Dicaprio drinks water and the water leaks out of his throat. Finally, the most mind- blowing scene was when he opens up the horse's stomach and takes out the premature horse babies and goes inside the horse in order to not freeze to death. (Literally OMG)
During the movie, Dicaprio would sometimes see a vision of his dead wife and son and at the end, it was really sad because after Dicaprio accomplishes his revenge by letting Tom Hardy die, now he has nothing to hold on to because he has accomplished his mission. So in the final scene, the wife looks at Dicaprio and turns away... :(
Anyways I think the director and actors did well and even though the plot is simple, this is more of a feel-type movie.
94.5/100 (A)