Rocky II in the Woods

Rating: 7/10 (6 May 2016)

There is a lot to like in The Revenant. The cinematography is jaw dropping and the landscape is a character in it's own right - the camera work is excellent throughout, with some real bravura camera moments. The camera work makes one feel intimate with the action and one goes through the horrific series of events that Glass endures. A special mention for the sound design, which I thought was sublime. I felt that that the filmmakers were trying to capture the time in all of it's brutality and I think that they managed that with a combination of expert editing, grading and production design.
DiCaprio is great, in a grunty kind of way - I don't think it's his best performance by far but I think he was due an Oscar. I thought Tom Hardy was much better and it took me a while to actually register it was him at all. I had no problem with understanding the dialogue - a common complaint, it seems - and thought that the mumbled and incoherent utterances of the trappers was in-keeping with the period.
There is a fair amount of digital work here that is sometimes excellent (the bear scene) and sometimes not (the herd of Buffalo). But I imagine there was way more as some of the shots must have been impossible without - which means they were outstanding in that I couldn't spot them.
The main issue is that this is not a very complicated movie. For all the needless shots of running water and leaves shot through with shafts of light, this was - essentially - Rocky II. He gets beat up, left for dead and comes back for revenge in a classic re-birth storyline (I lost count at 3 at the amount of times he emerged out of some kind of chrysalis...). I don't have a problem with that but in order to give weight to this the film- makers added 45 minutes of 'meanwhile back at the ranch...' shots that broke the flow.
If you accept that this is a simple, brutal story and nothing more then you will enjoy it. But maybe only the once. But that bear scene is awesome.