Coming out of The
Revenant I felt like I had just been beaten to an emotional pulp after a relentless
brutal battle against man and nature, much like the hero of this story who was
mauled by a Grizzly to within an inch of his life. And that’s just the beginning
of his problems as he miraculously managed to overcome his injuries despite
many attempts by angry native tribes and some of his own companions to kill him
off.
The Revenant is an
epic wild ride through the fur trade era’s legendary adventures of Hugh Glass,
a hunting scout for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1823, based on the novel
by Michael Punke of the same name, and his harrowing ordeal in the wilderness
of 19th century uncharted Upper Missouri River.
This is a prestige picture from an Oscar-winning director,
Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, with a big name star Leonardo DiCaprio, and an
epic story based loosely on historical legend. But despite all that, The Revenant doesn’t feel like a typical
Hollywood film, in fact this film is far superior to most Hollywood movies.
Director of last year’s Oscar-winning best picture Birdman (2014), Iñarritu’s obsessively
demanding methods and brilliant vision have raised the bar for epic scale
realism and immersive experience in today’s cinema. If you compare his film
with other Hollywood depictions of this era with films like Dances with Wolves (1990) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992), The Revenant far surpasses them in
cinematic grandeur and gut wrenching suspense.
Hugh Glass who had previously been captured by Pawnee
Indians and has a son by a Pawnee native woman, is working as a guide for an
English company of fur trappers when they are viciously attacked by Arikara tribe
warriors who are on the warpath to rescue and retrieve the kidnapped daughter
of their chief.
The few survivors of the attack which opens the film with
hair-raising realism as the camera continuously moves, caught in the thick of
the battle, like one of its participants, eventually escape down river but must
abandon their boat and trek on foot across frozen winter landscapes back to the protection
of their fort.
Filmed in breathtaking locations of rough virgin landscapes
around Alberta and Argentina, The
Revenant is as stunningly beautiful as its story is brutally harsh.
Iñarritu pulls no punches as he graphically depicts the harrowing struggles of
men against nature, carrying out their own form of frontier justice.
When Glass is attacked by a Grizzly bear protecting its
cubs, he is near death with life-threatening wounds and doesn’t have long to
live without any medical attention in the harsh conditions. Unable to move but
still alive he is carried by the rest of the surviving trappers as he is the
only one who knows the way back through the wilderness.
Eventually they come to the conclusion that he must be
abandoned if the rest of the group is to survive and they leave him and his son
and two others to give him a proper burial if and when he dies. With hostile
native Indians still on their trail, one of the men, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) elected
to tend to the injured Glass, is not eager to fulfill his obligations and soon
succumbs to his baser instincts to hasten the inevitable.
But what Fitzgerald doesn’t anticipate is Glass’s resilience
and spirit of survival and justice. What follows is one of the most
excruciating depictions of inexhaustible drive to fight for life that’s ever
been put on screen. It gives new meaning and dimension to the power of the
human spirit.
In addition to this captivating story, The Revenant also manages to accurately give us an authentic sense
of what life must have been like for people who lived during this time period,
and Leonardo DiCaprio gives us one of the most engaging performances of his career.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this is the year he finally goes home with the
Oscar.
JP
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