The most mind-bogglingly overrated film in a long, long time

Rating: 3/10 (22 January 2016)

The Revenant exists only as Oscar-bait, and I have no doubt that DiCaprio deserves the award for such a brutal role in tough conditions. However, the rest of the film serves absolutely zero purpose, has no deeper meaning, barely any story beyond the struggle for survival, and almost collapses under the weight of its own self- importance. This is not the first time that the story of Hugh Glass has been brought to life, but its certainly the most alienating and depressing.
We've seen this struggle done before. Tom Hanks in Cast Away is a lasting example of an actor putting their body through hell and going full-on cave man. Cast Away also dealt with the themes of loneliness, sanity, and the need for direction. In the Revenant I knew almost nothing of the inner workings of Glass or Fitzgerald (a rather over-rated Tom Hardy performance). Glass seems to cope just fine with being alone (the pretentious hallucinations of his family only puzzled me), but I have a feeling that this was not the intention. As for direction (within the movie, I mean) it is noble that all of it was shot on location but there is no sense of space or place. We never know where any of these characters are in relation to each other. Every new location looks different from the last but we never have any orientation or a grasp of the greater landscape. All it would have taken is a five second shot of a map with any random character saying "here we are, and this is where we are going".
Alejandro González Iñárritu's pompous style of long, long takes is completely inappropriate for this material and it took me out of the movie every time he tried to pull it off. I don't want to believe I am watching a documentary. I want to be excited and feel tension. The bear attack scene was brutal, but I would have felt more fear and anxiety had it actually be edited than done in one long shot. This kind of direction is not the antidote to Michael Bay's 1000 cuts in a minute nonsense. It was a mistake to shoot the film like this. Totally unnecessary.
As for the cinematography, a lot of people are praising it but it left me unimpressed. I admire the fact that they fought to shoot it all under natural light but almost every shot was wide and flat, wide and flat, wide and flat, wide and flat. Not once was I in awe of any spectacle or breathtaking natural beauty. Attenborough documentaries are shot better than this and spend less time on indulgent cutaways. Perhaps the grain and texture of 35mm could have fixed this.
If you want a one man against nature story of survival then watch Cast Away. If a grisly tale of genocide against a new world backdrop is what you are after then Apocalypto is much better. The Revenant bored me and I walked out of the cinema immensely disappointed.