The Revenant

I will have to say that the academy has given the deserving awards to the movie The Revenant. The occasionally dragging story of Hugh Glass’s life experience gets an unbelievable visual treatment through the lenses of Emmanuel Lubezki and Leonardo DiCaprio’s stunning portrayal along with the uncompromised making style of Alejandro Inarritu adds more quality in to the movie’s credit. The tiring duration and the lack of layers have definitely taken away the sort of class we might have expected, but still The Revenant has some really catchy elements to its credit.

The film is based on the life of an American Fur Trapper Hugh Glass.  One expedition of Glass ends up in a disastrous scenario when the crew he guided got attacked by Natives and he personally got attacked by a bear. How he survives that hard time and how he took revenge on John Fitzgerald whose greed caused a severe personal lose to Glass is what The Revenant all about.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, The Revenant may not stay in your mind as an ultimate classic. But if you are someone who observes the method of film making carefully, there are a lot of things in this film that will amaze you. They have shot it without the usage of artificial lights, the locations were real and harsh and still Lubezki and Inarrittu manages to produce visual marvels. The way those endless long shots were conceived is simply mind blowing and you just wonder how the hell they designed and executed such sequences. From brutal sequences to the wide angle shots that capture the beauty of nature, The Revenant is undoubtedly a movie that has truly reinvented the visual medium of cinema.

On screen Leonardo DiCaprio does become Hugh Glass. You might even doubt whether he is acting or just behaving as the conditions under which filming happened was really worse. Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald is a less appreciated and talked about performance. The actor was really good in that particular antagonistic character. Rest of the cast was also nice with neat performances.

Alejandro Inarrittu who stunned us last year with his impeccable making style through Birdman, once again shows us how adamant he is about picturing what he has seen in his mind. From the visuals itself it is clear that a hell a lot of preparation has gone through in giving that perfect raw feel to this survival theme. The drawback that has taken away the cult status from the movie is its tiring screenplay and it’s not so convincing efforts to give it certain emotional interpretations. In an attempt to create visual spectacles, Inarrittu seems to have given less significance on the emotional side of the character. It becomes too tiring towards the middle and end portions and you just wish to see the end of this suffering. I hope I don’t need to talk anything more about Chivo’s cinematography as the review itself sounds like a testimony to his outstanding work. The production design, edits and the makeup department were also really good.

Expecting a brilliant content driven cinema with layers may not be a good idea in my opinion. The Revenant has a behaving DiCaprio, a director who has shown zero mercy in getting what he wanted and a cinematographer who has taken the visual medium to another level. Do watch it to witness that new level of film making.