The Revenant

This may just be the hardest and most contradictory review I’ve ever had to write, and I’m having a hard time figuring out why. Bear with me if you can.

The Revenant, the newest film from last year’s Best Director and Best Picture winner Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, is a brutal look at the length one man will go to cheat death in the frigid wilderness of the American frontier. Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), stranded alone without a shred of help or hope, faces the unknown dangers of an untamed world as he tries to survive long enough to exact revenge on John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), the man who left him for dead after a vicious bear attack. Glass quickly makes it his sole purpose to stop at nothing to get who he’s after, and needless to say, the struggle gets real for him; so freakin real.

First things first, this movie is pretty damn good across the board in nearly every aspect. It’s got plenty of tension, phenomenal acting, strikingly beautiful cinematography, direction, and production value, and is hands down one of the most brutal films I’ve seen this year, but despite all of that I felt like something was missing. I’ve been trying to put a finger on it since the final fadeout and I’ve come to this conclusion: The Revenant is by far one of the most impressively made films in recent memory, but the movie itself is a cleverly disguised by the book Oscar bait of a film, that if handled by anyone else would not be nearly as successful as it is. I know that’s not a good way to judge a film, but wowing at face level doesn’t mean much if said wow is the only things that make the movie stand out. The Revenant matters in all of the traditional ways i.e. direction, cinematography, and acting, but there’s not much substance outside of that.

Sure, there’s an emotional core to Glass and his situation that DiCaprio nails perfectly, but that emotion doesn’t really carry over through the rest of the film. It hits hard when it’s present, then kind of fades until the filmmakers need to use it again. Same goes for the story; it’s relatively simple in its tale of revenge, but even that gets a little lost as the film moves randomly from following Glass, to seeing what the traitorous Fitzgerald is up to, to checking in at odd times with a group of Native Americans who are on the lookout for one of their own who has been kidnapped, to watching the fallout of Glass’ abandonment through the eyes of his former crew. Again, all of this is acted and directed perfectly, but there is far too much jumping around and unfocused storytelling that seems to mean nothing until all of the threads come together near the end of the film. Usually that’s all fine and good, but my problem with this is that even though these plot threads eventually do pay off, they don’t really add much overall until that point, leading me to believe that even if most of these scenes were cut, it would not affect the way I watched or perceived the film. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with the way this film unfolded, it just needed to be tightened up a bit more story and pacing-wise.

More often than not I kept finding myself engrossed with what was happening at any given time, each scene and performance truly gripping me and not letting go, but when I think about the movie as a whole, I can’t honestly say that it all stuck. Each scene is masterful on its own but when put together it all kind of feels off, like a humongous explosion that you know is gonna be epic but you still kinda go “meh” after it fizzles out. It’s not that it isn’t a good explosion, it’s just that you can’t only rely on spectacle to carry a film like this, which is exactly what I feel like has happened here. It almost seems like the filmmakers had a bunch of kick-ass scenes in mind to really show off their technical skills but then forgot about stringing them together in a coherent and different way.

Speaking of technical skills, the way this film utilizes only natural light and the long, one take shots Inarritu is now known for, heightens the look and feel of this film to heights I haven’t seen before. I felt like I was actually smack dab in the middle of the icy wasteland these characters inhabit, and dare I say it, actually wish this movie was shot in 3D. I can only imagine the effect it’d have on the way this film encompasses and surrounds you, and outside of some shoddy CG work at times, there’s really nothing in this film from a technical standpoint that disappoints. Acting-wise, Leo, while doing a great job on a physical level in this film, doesn’t have the range or interaction with other characters that he needs to really act to his fullest. He spends most of his screen time grunting and crawling and foaming at the mouth, which he pulls off with brutal efficiency, but in the overall picture, it seems like Hardy’s character got more of what I was expecting Leo to have. In fact, the marketing might even be a bit misleading, mostly focusing on the idea that this is Leo’s movie when in fact, it’s more of an ensemble piece.

Despite my back and forth and annoyingly contradicting viewpoints (I know how I’m coming off here, people), The Revenant is still a great piece of cinema that does everything right…but not to the fullest extent that I was expecting. I really shouldn’t complain since there’s technically nothing really wrong with it, I just felt like it needed that something extra that wasn’t present in the final product. It’s worth a watch, worth the nominations, but not worth Best Picture or Best Actor win in my opinion. I’m sure Leo will still get his statue when the time comes since he absolutely deserves one, I just don’t think this should be the movie he gets it for. I also believe Inarritu deserves a Best Director win due to the sheer technical achievement of a film like this, I just wish the movie as a whole did something more. This is a great flick; it’s just nothing more and nothing less than that.