What an ordeal

Rating: 5/10 (8 February 2016)

Oh thank God it's over.
Those were the words I uttered out loud when "DIRECTED BY ALEJANDRO G. INARRITU" mercifully appeared on screen at the conclusion of this 2.5 hour test of human endurance - and I'm talking about the audience as much as the fictional characters and real life crew. The Revenant is as much an ordeal to sit through at times as it must have been to live. So much of the film is "LOOK! ACTING!" and "LOOK! CINEMATOGRAPHY!" that nothing is ever enjoyable. Of all the films I've ever seen, The Revenant is the one I can say, 100%, that I will never watch again in my life.
Leonardo DiCaprio has done much better work than this. I never bought his relationship with his son. Hugh Glass is a near-zombified character that bears none of the energy of Billy Costigan, Jordan Belfort, Howard Hughes, Arnie Grape or Frank Abagnale. DiCaprio groans and mutters throughout the movie, sometimes spitting in the screen he's acting so hard. That's just it - DiCaprio is acting, and he's acting really well but he's not performing. I never bought him as a person for a moment. Compare the grief displayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years a Slave to the "grief" shown by DiCaprio here, and the soon to be Academy Award winner comes up drastically short.
Tom Hardy is completely incomprehensible half the time as Fitzgerald, but gives a much better performance than DiCaprio does. His eyes seem to pierce the audience when he tells a story, and unlike Glass, he feels like a real person who might have existed. The film is infinitely more interesting when the film is following Hardy, Will Poulter or Domhnall Gleeson, the latter of whom gives a commanding performance as the group's captain.
The film's screenplay has its moments but for the most part there's not a lot of dialogue and that which exists just services the story and leaves the storytelling up to visuals. The cinematography is impressive, especially the gimmick that Lubezki found to justify his third Oscar in the use of natural light. There's some beautiful stuff to look at in The Revenant, even if 2 hours and 36 minutes is an awful lot to take in. At times I felt like I could have been watching The Lord of the Rings. Then I wished I was watching The Lord of the Rings.
Technically, the film is for the most part very impressive. The bad visual effects stood out - fake CGI animals most notably. The bear was impressive even if the elks were not. There was some horrendous dubbing where Native American dialogue clearly does not match the movement of lips. I don't really think characters breath steaming up the camera creates any sense of authenticity. Costumes, production design and sound design are excellent, but the film's biggest coup is to the makeup artists who create some of the most gut-wrenching wounds I've ever seen in film. The editing is competent but there is a good twenty minutes of self-indulgent indigenous pretentiousness that could have been shaved from the film. I would have enjoyed a basic revenge story to the revenge story plus DiCaprio's stupid dream sequences.
If Alejandro walks home with his fourth and fifth Oscars to put beside the three he already has, I'll be incredibly disappointed in how shallow Hollywood is. The best way I can describe watching The Revenant is if I were judging a child's oral presentation where the child is so obsessed with giving the best performance he can that he starts to annoy me. By the end, I'm so overwhelmed with information and it has been so long, I just want it to be over. I can't fail him because he's done good work, but boy do I not want to reward him for it.