Reverence for The Revenant

Rating: 9/10 (22 December 2015)

If like myself you have been desensitized over the years by watching countless movies with blood, gore and violence and can now watch the beach scene during Saving Private Ryan as though it was an episode of Sesame Street, then prepare yourself to feel your pulse quicken once more and that urge to raise your hand to cover your eyes from the horror.......the horror. Those moments that are hard to watch but even harder not to, are here, this time in the form of a very upset 300kg grizzly bear and Leonardo DiCaprio's face. The realism of this scene is incredible...I'm still trying to work out how they filmed it......maybe it really happened and they've patched Leonardo back up somehow. The Revenant, based on the TRUE yet unbelievable story of frontiersman Hugh Glass,(1780 – 1833) is a survival revenge flick. The camera work is some of the best I've seen om film, it flows effortlessly like a ghost on the breeze, taking you up and close and sometimes closer than you would like to be. These shots are often juxtaposed with some truly beautiful and hypnotic images the wilderness. A great cast of actors including Tom Hardy, who doesn't look like Tom Hardy again and has to be one of the best British actors of recent times. I knew he was in this movie and I still didn't recognize him at first. He plays the hillbilly you'll love to hate and is excellent throughout this epic odyssey. Leonardo DiCaprio does some of his best work in this movie and also eats some truly disgusting food ( even Rambo wouldn't touch ) in order to portray the realism of his character. As he crawls over 200 miles towards his salvation spurred on by his revenge, you will feel every grunt and groan that his half dead corpse is capable of producing. Surely he deserves an Oscar, if not only for best actor but for best stomach. The Revenant is as uplifting as it is traumatic and like his previous movie Birdman, director Alejandro González Iñárritu has a gift for making it personal. A gift for transporting you from your arm chair into another world, which in my opinion is what we want a movie to do. Like Hugh Glass you will go through an ordeal in this film, one that I highly recommend you survive for 159 minutes.