All That Went Wrong with The Revenant

Rating: 5/10 (8 February 2016)

It's the Oscars season hooray! And everyone seems on the lookout for who deserves the ultimate Hollywoodian honor and who is going to go home with a gold Uncle Oscar. I've been avidly following the ceremony for years now, but that doesn't necessarily mean I hold it in the highest regard; everybody knows it's all politics at the end of the day.
Today I went to the cinema to watch this year's most talked about film, Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant, trying so hard to ignore the two Golden Globes, the 12 Oscars nominations and the 8.3 IMDb rating. To cut things short: I was immensely let down, and here are my reasons why:
1) Iñárritu is a genius, there is no doubt about it, but geniuses are obviously not immune to over-inflated ego. The Mexican director has become popular with film critics and moviegoers worldwide for his ability to make films that are both aesthetically and thematically stunning – films that are so beautiful to look at and so touching you could easily relate to. Who would ever forget the heartbreaking realities of Amores Perros (2000) and Babel (2006)? And the surreal worlds of Biutiful (2010) and Birdman (2014)? After those masterpieces, The Revenant looks like a sheer act of muscle flexing. We get it, Iñárritu! You can do magic with your camera; you can take beautiful long shots, you can make a man-bear fight look so goddam real, you can film inexplicable gore and violence like no one has ever done before, yet I was bored to death because I couldn't feel the slightest connection to anything or anyone. The film comes out visually outstanding but cinematically fragile because it lacks the substance that should hold it together. The entire plot is based on a father- son relationship that wasn't developed enough (or wasn't developed at all) for the viewer to emotionally connect with Hugh Glass, the revenant, which made me feel that the whole survival quest was a bit on the absurd side.
2) Clichés. Clichés. Clichés! The film is so rife with clichés I actually thought Iñárritu is playing some kind of a joke on us. A die-hard hero, a classic mindless villain, a dead Pocahontas, a wise chief and of course some careless Frenchies. And don't you think the clichés just stop at character level, they run deep to include predictable plots and extremely bromidic lines and dream sequences. I don't mind that the story is a cliché revenge story, it's the treatment that concerns me. The Revenant is basically about a man who wastes two precious hours of our lives looking for another man who killed his son and left him for dead, and when he finally finds him, the evil man's dying words are revenge is no good. The end. That's it, I swear. If you can see something beyond that, please feel free to contact me.
3) I don't usually like to dwell on this point in my film reviews but the improbability of the events was pointless and so difficult to ignore. So we have a man who is fatally attacked by a grizzly bear, almost smothered to death, shot at, falls down a waterfall and off a cliff, stabbed and beaten (I hope I didn't forget anything), yet he miraculously survives! I expect to see him in the next Avengers movie.
4) Number four is not really a shortcoming but a disaster redeemed. The outstanding performance by all the cast members makes up for the one dimensionality of the roles they play. Domnhall Gleeson and Tom Hardy hit all the right notes with exceptional maturity (even though I thought Hardy's Texan accent was a bit funny, but maybe on purpose?). Both are actually growing on me in a speed of light. DiCaprio was amazing as usual but I don't think this is the performance he should get an Oscar for. I do appreciate all the trouble and the physical pain he had to go through but compared with his other performances I'm sorry Leo, you can do much better. Anyways, if he grabs an Oscar this year, he would still deserve it, retroactively.
The music and the sound editing in general were annoying. I would've sufficed with DiCaprio's incessant heavy breathing.. which is equally annoying to be honest.
Go watch Cast Away instead. If you have seen it already, watch it again it would still be a more enjoyable experience.