Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writers: Mark L. Smith, Alejandro González Iñárritu
Cast: Leondardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck
Runtime: 156 mins.
2015
Iñárritu has done it again. Following hot on the heels of his Best Picture win with Birdman, he has crafted yet another arthouse film that has thrust its way into mainstream consciousness. The Revenant has garnered a ton of buzz, topped the box office, and snagged a whole bunch of Oscar nominations. However, and I promise you I'm not simply being contrarian when I say this: The Revenant is a narrative failure. It's a bad story told haphazardly, yet in the most stylistically impressive way imaginable. It's all the more disappointing because it was close to being so much better.
Let's ignore the buzz surrounding the movie for a while. All that business about how difficult it was to film, and how Leo DiCaprio almost got killed a dozen times over--that'll come up later. For now let's just look at the film. Much of the runtime follows a scout for a party of trappers named Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio). He gets into arguments with fellow trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) about how best to get back to safety in the wake of a brutal Native American raid. Then he gets destroyed by a bear. Glass appears to be slowly dying, so team captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) elects three men to stay behind and take care of him: Glass's half-Indian son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), the young and goodhearted Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and the aforementioned greedy bastard Fitzgerald. The raiding party could come back at any point, so Fitzgerald goes ahead and tries to kill Glass, then kills Hawk instead and hides the body so that he and Bridger can move on, leaving Glass in a shallow grave. But Fitzgerald underestimates Glass's ability to crawl long distances.
