A Lesson in Fearless Filmmaking

Rating: 8/10 (15 January 2016)

Unless you're a sadist, The Revenant won't make you "feel good". Its aims are more visceral than that. Yes, the already infamous bear attack sequence is unlike anything you've ever seen, but that's not all that will puncture your skin. The splash of water. The smoke of gunfire. The embers from the fire. The spit escaping from freeze-dried lips. The blood-stained rivers and snow. You feel every bit. Pulling from master filmmakers like Malick, Tarchovsky, and Kurosawa, Inarritu gives us a poetic western that, while not quite as impenetrable as its influences, still stuns with an intensity only matched by its graceful beauty. The unbelievable story of Hugh Glass, an 1800s frontiersman left for dead in a snow-covered wasteland, is a story of endurance. But unlike this year's Martian, which celebrated hard-science as a means of survival, Revenant is focuses on sheer force of will. The trials Glass suffers are abandoned with intensity, and DiCaprio gives an unrelentingly committed performance. However, the real star is director of photography Emmauel Lubezki (Birdman, Gravity), who delivers a shockingly graceful look at a merciless subject. Fluid, gritty, and focused, we're given a beautiful 360-degree view of the treacherous snow-scape. Director Innaritu doesn't give us quite the full scope of character that Lubezki does of visuals. The dialogue is passable at best, and clichéd and ham-fisted at worst. This made the 156 minutes drag some, especially in the middle. Luckily, the strength of the themes still comes through: despite whom or what we encounter, our only true enemy is death. Bleak? Surebut Revenant rises above its misery as a lesson in fearless filmmaking.