Visceral and Visually Stunning.....

Rating: 7/10 (8 March 2016)

A highly anticipated contender for Oscars, "The Revenant" landed with winning the coveted awards for Best Director and Best Actor, giving Leonardo Di Caprio his much awaited Oscars and losing Best Picture to "The Spotlight." The film deserves a heavy applause for two very strong reasons. The first for the superb cinematography it uses which gives the depiction of the 18th century America and an expedition of the hunters in the snow capped mountains of North America. The landscapes and the camera angle chill your spines and frightens for the force of nature and isolation it can bring. For most of the part, the film uses the natural landscape than computer generated images which has dominated film making for quite a time which makes it a visual treat. The second reason to admire the film is the superb performance of Leonardo Di Caprio, who appears away from his Titanic fame boyish performances which he has been giving most of the time. Without much of the dialogues, he somewhat gets into the skin of the character sparkling the screen in his presence.
Undoubtedly, the film is flawless technically and sets a benchmark in the cinematographic achievement in movies. But regarding the story and script, the film lacks a tightness and fails to grip at times. The tightness of Alejandro's earlier movies "Amorres Perros" and "Babel" is somewhat missing in this one. The film becomes a survival game in the wilderness of American landscape, somewhat familiar from Tom Hank's "Cast Away." Then the film draws to a revenge story where the protagonist avenges for the desolation from his friend who attempts to kill him and his son, which seems pretty obvious. There isn't much substance in the story and it somewhat drags and is interested in holding the viewers for the star power of Di Caprio with scars and anticipation to be free from the desolation rather than the story. Had the story been tighter and the length been trimmed a bit, the film could have been much memorable.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 4