The Revenant

Does watching a movie that features nothing but human suffering appeal to most moviegoers outside of those who are die-hard into these extreme niche exploitative films or ”refined” film critics?  While suffering is the basis for an audience to experience empathy and it acts as an easy tool for investment, but the tolerance level for watching something intentionally unpleasant under the guise of being experimental, a survivalist demonstration or high art that is ”willing to go to those areas” can only go so far, made even worse if the content around said suffer is dull. The 2015 Alejandro González Iñárritu film, The Revenant, dives headfirst into this principle with its delivery and actor without much care for basic storytelling components, and despite having plenty of source material and real-life events to base itself on, it never manages to become more than a highly subjective film that feels specifically constructed to cater to Academy Award voters and nothing else. Set in 1823 within the Dakotas territory, the film follows a young frontiersman named Hugh Glass (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who is travelling with a group of trappers and his son, Hawk (played by Forrest Goodluck) and are forced to recuperate in the woods after being attacked by Arikara war party. Things suddenly become dangerous again when Glass is viciously attacked by a grizzly bear and left in a catatonic state. With the snow slowly consuming the crew’s energy, food, and mental stability, one of his fellow hunters named John Fitzgerald (played by Tom Hardy), attempts to smother Glass, but Hawk’s intervention results in his Fitzgerald killing him, with Glass having no ability to stop him. After being left to survive on his own in critical condition, the rest of the film focuses on his struggle to regain himself, resist nature’s obsession with killing him, and get revenge on the man who took his son from him while haunting memories of his wife (played by Grace Dove) urge him to continue clinging to life. Based on a true story and the novel of the same name written by Michael Punke in 2002, The Revenant confuses gritty oppressive imagery for engaging art house cinema, resulting in a visually pleasing but otherwise unpleasant viewing experience that barely establishes character and emotional intrigue.

When the trailers initially came out, the film showed quite a bit of promise, looking like it was trying to be a survivalist story akin to something like 127 Hours or Buried, but with an artistic edge that comes from a real-life event. A story of survival can be very engaging even if the content is minimal as hoping for someone to survive against even just nature is intriguing and emotionally effective if it handled correctly. However, upon viewing the film, it feels incredibly underwhelming, more focused on looking and sounding pretty rather than engaging, and slightly deceiving, mostly lacking focus and feeling more like an artistic Oscar grab rather than an actual three-act character-driven movie, which makes more sense when you see that one of the producers on this film, Arnon Milchan, has produced several films that did well at the Academy Awards like JFK, 12 Years a Slave, Bohemian Rhapsody, and even director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s previous film, Birdman. He has clearly shown his talents in other films with critical success like 21 Grams and Babel, and the production clearly shows that he cares about his filmmaking and passion, but very little of that talent feels properly represented in this story, which fabricates a real-life event so strongly that it almost becomes a completely different tale outside of its baseline. Adding fake elements to a true story is acceptable if the spirit of the story is kept in check, but it seems more focused on showing the harsh world rather than how an individual is surviving this harsh world. There are themes scattered around about xenophobia and the trials and tribulations one goes through to exact what could just be a hollow revenge, but because the film isn’t interested in developing its characters or its narrative, they don’t leave any impression and don’t get noticed by its audience. The screenplay by Mark L. Smith and Iñárritu feels so weak and underused, either containing cliches that feel too cinematic to be truly authentic (at least in the way the film portrays them) and provides little surrounding meat in the narrative to feel fleshed out or properly explored, therefore not being compact enough to exist as a solo survivalist story, but also not complex and elaborate enough to be an artistic historical period piece (having a writer who solely worked on smaller horror films probably didn’t help things either). The pacing is also very inconsistent, taking its time before the lead is mauled and left for dead before slowing down to a halt for the remainder of the flick to waste almost an hour on gruelingly slow realistic survival scenarios. Even with adages like dream sequences, they act more like long breaths before returning to the usual rush rather than actual scenes.

A simplistic or bare bones narrative in a survival story isn’t essential if the characters are strong enough to get you through it, but no character in this film is memorable or interesting. They never feel like real people going through these harrowing situations, rather actors reading lines and trying to get something out of their minimal material, which more often than not, ruins what could be great roles. Tom Hardy is a solid actor, and he does a decent job at playing this bad guy, but he isn’t given any characterization or memorable writing to make him an actual threat, he just feels like some random person and his minimal connection with the lead results in the climax feeling dull and unsatisfactory. None of the side characters like Domhnall Gleeson and Will Poulter stand out either but considering that there aren’t a lot and how little they impact the narrative, that isn’t too much of a problem.  Leonardo DiCaprio won his long-awaited Oscar for this film, and it’s pretty hard to gage why that would be outside of the mere fact that he put himself through excruciating pain throughout a majority of this film’s production. The real issue comes from his lack of dialogue which keeps him from being a memorable performance or defined personality, but rather just an actor who is willing to push himself to whatever extremes are necessary for what the film requires which feels very manipulative and against what is required for a movie of this type. This isn’t necessarily his fault, but rather just a product of the movie he was cast in and despite looking like he’s putting in effort both when normal and when in pain (probably because he didn’t have to fake it), there’s zero memorability in this performance. The struggles a character goes through mean nothing if you don’t relate with them, and no character in this film has an emotional connection and therefore, you don’t care about them. He isn’t made interesting, and he isn’t given a personality to be likable or endearing, so he could be replaced with anyone else, and it wouldn’t change a thing. When he’s allowed to say anything, he delivers them fine, but it’s so minimal and blandly written that you could remove it from the film entirely and not miss anything.

What this film lacks in story and characters, it makes up for with environments, cinematography, and atmosphere.  The biggest and most memorable character of this film isn’t any of the people, it’s the landscapes. There are various moments where the film will stop and show off the environment and gives it an eerie deathly air that really sticks with the audience whenever it’s displayed in that manner. They have a sick ghostly atmosphere to them; it seems suffocating and creepily quiet. The environment manages to have the strongest personality in the whole film; it feels realistic and brutal, but also otherworldly and ominous, almost like a dream that’s trying to keep you from waking up. The landscapes are overwhelming and really show the characters’ isolation and loneliness, also coming from the way the shots are composed. The cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki also has some great -stand out moments, with various breathtaking establishing shots that really give off a sense of people feeling minuscule in the grand scheme of nature’s plan. It varies in techniques from moment to moment, going from cinematic shots, to panning shots, to hand-held style; it has a variety of shooting techniques that helps to give this film a bit more of an edge than just a typical action survival film and adds to this artistic semblance that despite feeling pointless, does bring a style to an otherwise nothing project. Its tone of brutal realism is easily conveyed through the more personal camera shots, and the background and environment shots give it that cinematic style that combines the two pretty well. With these elements, it gives the film a nice combination of pretty and pristine shots in some moments and gruff and ugly in other moments. The action is also very minimal and nothing spectacular. They are shot well and feel very intimate and fast-paced, but there aren’t many moments throughout that will get your heart racing outside of the bear attack, which is decently handled and relatively uncomfortable.

The Revenant’s major flaw comes down to being style over substance. It made such a great job at giving these environments so much personality and atmosphere that they may have forgotten to do that with the story and characters. These roles are very forgettable, the story feels run-down and generic, as well as unfocused, and while the environments are well shot and look nice, they can get repetitive to look at after a while so even its strongest element isn’t handled correctly enough to ignore the rest of its shortcomings. All these other survivalist stories like 127 Hours and Buried have similar ideas and deliveries, but they at least know to make the focus on the individual and how they are affected by this incident, whereas this film doesn’t care about who or why, it only cares about how it can look to Academy voters. It’s not an awful film and from a style and presentation standpoint, you’ll get something out of it at least, but other than that, it doesn’t leave much of a sizable impact. Check it out for some pretty visuals and haunting atmosphere, but other than that, it’s hard to survive this one.