Almost every person, animal, and landscape in director Alejandro Iñaritu’s new movie The Revenant is out to kill its protagonist, legendary frontiersman Hugh Glass. Glass, a rugged trapper and survivalist, is played by a teeth-gritting, spitting, rasping, bleeding Leonardo DiCaprio, whose seems to be desperately fighting for his long-desired Oscar, and succeeding. Director, cinematographers, writers, and actors have created a desolate and bleak landscape in which every action comes down to a desperate struggle for survival, and every conflict is kill or be killed.
The Revenant is a movie focused to a single, sharp theme: Glass’ quest for revenge upon another trapper known only as Fitzgerald (played by Tom Hardy), the man who betrayed Glass and killed his son. Everything else – Natives searching for a lost princess, French fur trappers willing to kill Indians and Americans on sight, and of course an angry grizzly bear – are all just distractions to Glass’s ultimate goal.
The movie boils its characters down to simple, powerful, and focused obsessions, and holds them up to legendary proportions. Glass literally crawls his way out of death time and time again, Fitzgerald is the scum of the earth, obsessed only with self preservation, and Andrew Henry (played by Domhnall Gleeson), is the valiant captain, defined by his intense sense of duty and honor. Excellent writing combined with dedicated acting brings these characters to life on screen and even further in the viewer’s imagination. When these forces collide, it’s like watching a hurricane.
The Revenant is not for the queasy. Its violence is omnipresent, visceral, and made even more impactful by how visibly it is portrayed. Battle scenes are shot wide, allowing for a cohesive visual understanding of the entire scene, and the camera stays in motion, putting you directly into the action. One battle in particular flows seamlessly through the chaos, following individual conflicts around the battlefield to focus in on each extra’s bloody demise one by one. The scene is exciting, fast, and disturbingly realistic.
The Revenant is not a perfect film, but its faults are hard to pinpoint simply because, depending on the interpretation, they could be viewed as strengths. From beginning to end, The Revenant rests on the knife’s edge between just enough and too much. Yes, having no cuts in a fantastically choreographed fight scene is impressive, but is the same trick necessary when characters are chatting around a campfire? Yes, Glass is a mythical figure, but at what point does example after example of his invincibility become absurd? At points the movie seems so absorbed in itself that it forgets there’s an audience that has to watch it too. DiCaprio’s performance is constantly tortured (he really wants that Oscar), every single shot is swooping, spinning, or dancing around the action, and was it really necessary to have Glass save the enslaved Indian princess and win the respect of the Sioux in order to further prove his moral superiority?
The Revenant is a movie that knows exactly what it wants, and achieves it in both its successes and failings. It gets a little wrapped up in itself, but a movie that overshoots its mark is far better than the countless ones that don’t have any cohesive vision whatsoever. For that, The Revenant gets four out of five stars.