"The Revenant": Exhausting and Exhilarating Odyssey of Revenge

Rating: 10/10 (10 January 2016)

From thequickflickcritic.blogspot.com/
Academy Award winner Alejandro González Iñárritu ("Birdman") directed, co-wrote and co-produced "The Revenant" with the indisputable intent of transporting his audience back to the primitive and animalistic conditions inherent to the brutal and untamed North American wilderness of the early 19th Century. Having experienced this masterpiece in modern filmmaking now myself, I feel qualified to deliver the following declaration in the most resounding manner possible...MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!!!
With each stunning scene of grim grandeur Iñárritu passed before my eyes, I was unwaveringly riveted, hurtled headlong, swept into every successive moment, captivated in a whirling dervish of surging vitality.
From ultra-violent Native (and non-indigenous) American ambushes, to excruciatingly crude cleansing of heinous bodily wounds, to a Grizzly Bear mauling that for all the world appears to be ACTUALLY happening, I was rendered at once exhausted and exhilarated in the wake of a furiously unrelenting assault on my emotions.
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the role of his career as real-life frontier legend Hugh Glass, "The Revenant" is a ferociously ambitious epic, presented essentially in three distinct acts: Escape, Survival and Revenge. Tom Hardy's perfect performance as reprehensible antagonist and the reviled target of Glass's relentless scorn, John Fitzgerald, serves to further solidify the richly gifted actor, together with DiCaprio, among the genuine elite of their craft.
There is a deeply effecting, albeit brief, Epilogue to "The Revenant", as the nearly two and a half hours of full-force frenzy that has preceded it comes to a movingly quiet climax.
An unspeakably tortured soul has found peace. At the end of a long and agonizing odyssey, and at long last, enduring peace.
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