I was one of the privileged bastards who witnessed The Revenant today, in an air-conditioned theatre with refreshments, while Leonardo Dicaprio fought tooth and nail to survive all odds after being pummeled by a bear in the woods. The year is 1832 and the movie is based loosely on the novel of the same name by Michael Punke,on the fur trapper cum survivalist Hugh Glass, whose drive for revenge miraculously brings him back from the dead.
Watching The Revenant is a spectacular experience in itself, I tell you. Each frame is so beautiful, perfectly capturing nature's beauty and wrath, in all its purity..it is nothing short of breathtaking. The entire film(156 minutes)has been shot in natural light and in the silence of the theatre I could truly appreciate the impact of every movement onscreen. Leonardo Dicaprio has shown us his best yet, with a character he himself admits has been the most difficult to film in his career, what with director Alejandro G.Inaritu daringly venturing into the unexplored wild of Argentina,Canada and South Dakota, and half the crew deserting them on learning of the harsh conditions which they had to shoot in.
Tom Hardy is the impeccable villain ,all grit and no emotion(why does he always have to take up hateful characters? Seems to be awfully good at it too), who kills Glass's half-native son while the injured Glass helplessly watches on(one of the most heart wrenching scenes in the movie).
Just listening to the soundtrack evokes images of a desolate landscape stretching ahead into the horizon, almost oppressive silence and the loneliness that comes with it. Also discernible are the sounds of a crackling fire and the occasional wind. That is what makes the minimal music composed jointly by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner so intricately linked with the plot.
The film has already swept three Golden Globe Awards , five BAFTA Awards and has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards,including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (DiCaprio) and Best Supporting Actor (Hardy). For his performance, DiCaprio received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actor and the BAFTA Award for Best Leading Actor.
I felt guilty of the comforts available to me while watching the end result of the whole crew, about 15,000 people, working in -25 degree temperatures, going through hell to film just one and half hours everyday. Bravo, people! Your perseverance just might add to Dicaprio's laurels at the 2016 Academy Awards tomorrow. God knows he deserves it.
Just an aside,I am entirely avoiding the discussion regarding Leo's deserving the Oscar for Best Actor or not. That is up to the jury. And even if he does not win his sixth nomination, it does not matter since the world has already acknowledged his talent, to say the least. His choice of characters have always been off the beaten track and accompanied by an exemplary portrayal. All awards are more or less a hoax, anyway.
The direction, acting, cinematography, makeup,background score, and all the other aspects of this film fit together so well, you can't help but believe that the events portrayed are truly unfolding before your very eyes. When the lights dim and Dicaprio's face comes into focus(the flashback to when Glass's old camp was raided by the army and his wife was killed),wading through the river to hunt for pelts or when he rides off a cliff on a horse, you are hunting or plummeting with him.
I hated coming back to the real world after the final credits rolled by. All the light, the noise, the instant communication now available at our fingertips..I hated it. You see,man's problems are ever the same. In the nineteenth century(as depicted in The Revenant),civilisation was comprised of encampments in the wilderness - rangers, fur trappers, tribes like the Arikara hunting them to acquire pelts to exchange with the French nobility for arms and horses, and other native tribes like the Pawnee, who mingled with the other tribes to produce the so-called 'half-natives', like Glass's son, Hawk. Like Fitzgerald curses early in the movie about having no life, only a living,about the job being damned from the start, we see the bleakness of their lives. When the Arikara launch an attack on the temporary camp of the fur trappers headed by Captain Henry(Domhnall Gleeson),33 men are killed and the remaining 10 escape on a boat on an attempt to head back to camp at Fort Kiowa several miles West, on the Missouri river. En route, Hugh Glass,who knows the lay of the land best and is thus the accepted guide, gets mauled by a grizzly bear while venturing ahead alone. Just the weight of the massive beast knocks him down and tries to fight back in vain. The bear presently abandons its prey, only to be provoked by Glass's attempt to shoot it and then in an attempt to stab it to its end, Glass manages to shake him off ,though only for a moment- they encounter a slope and the bear's carcass drops on top of Glass's wasted body. There he lies, until the rest of the campers search him out and rescue him. The rest of the story follows the fur trappers loyally carrying Hugh on a temporary stretcher, and later abandoning the impractical idea.
As the ever bitter Fitzgerald put it, it would only slow them all down and get them killed. He hangs back, though, along with Hawk and Bridger(Will Poulter), when the captain offers to pay those who would tend to Glass for as long as necessary and then give him a proper burial, before catching up to the others on their way up the mountain. Fitzgerald ,of course, only does it for the money and when Hawk unwittingly comes in to see him choking his father to death, he reacts violently and gets killed.Glass can hardly breathe, is all covered in blood and dirt,and can only watch the torture of losing the only family left to him. When Bridger returns to camp from the river, Fitz makes up a story of them being pursued and makes a hurried departure,dragging the still alive(but barely)Glass to a messy grave.Painstakingly, inch by inch, gritting his teeth, moaning in unbearable pain, Dicaprio drags himself up and towards his son's corpse and lies there. He knows he need to move and grabbing whatever little supplies he had left(Fitz had taken the rifle; there were only the clothes and the water),he let the earth guide him forward, slowly gaining enough strength to walk with support , to hunt for food and water, and to hide when the Ree made themselves heard(he swims across a river when they catch up to him and gets caught in the current, but emerges alive, more or less. His need to avenge his son ultimately lead him back to camp. He had rescued the Arikara chief's daughter, Poqawa, from a Frenchman who wanted to rape her, and shortly after a lone White man approaches Captain Henry's camp with the water tumbler Bridger had left with him. The captain immediately launches a search party and they find Glass and take him back to camp and nurse his many wounds, which had partially healed owing to the treatment of a lone Pawnee tribesman, Hikuc, whom Glass had befriended n the wild but who was hanged by some French pelt hunters.Henry charges Bridger with treason and orders for him to be hanged,but Hugh later informs him that the kid had been scared into silence by Fitzgerald , who,being the coward he was, had already fled with the money to Texas, in order to "find a patch of land" and to reenlist to justify killing again.The captain, along with an insistent Glass set out to murder him, for leaving one of his men to rot in the forest ,but Henry ambushed by Fitz and killed. Glass pursues him and after a bloody duel in the unrelenting snow,throws him into the adjoining river. Fitzgerald mocked him to enjoy the revenge he had survived so many miles for, and Glass, remembering Hikuc, left it to the Creator to carry out justice. The final scene shoes him trudging up a snowy slope, newly injured, and hallucinating about his wife, yet again.
I did wish that they had shown him returning, victorious and still alive, to Fort Kiowa. I suppose the director meant for the end to be open to interpretation. However, the fact that 'the revenant' literally means "one who returns from the dead", gives me hope. After all, one of the most profound lines of the movie is when Dicaprio says, "I'm not afraid of dying anymore. I done it already."
Needless to say,the actors in supporting roles, a few of whom are Domhnall Gleeson and Will Poulter, have also done a great job.
There are subtle hints of Glass's daredevilry right from the beginning, in the form of his dead wife, who comes to him in dreams, egging him on to fight for life as long as he could draw out a breath. And then the lone Pawnee native, who offers him raw bison liver as food,and later, helpshis body heal, influence Hugh to leave revenge to the Creator.In the end, he throws an incapacitated Fitzgerald into a stream, and the Arikara on the opposite bank,finish the job.
I am ashamed to admit that I knew of the existence of the novel by Michael Punke only after watching the movie. Now that I have a virtual copy, I am definitely going to read it. It seems the movie is only loosely based on it,so I might take my own sweet time to start reading it,since I do not want to wipe out the story as told by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and the superb performances from my memory too soon.
Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is brilliant,and that is one of the additional things the film brought to light.
Since almost every movie of Leo's (and Iñárritu's,for that matter) is Oscar-worthy, you can be quite assured that they did not do it for the awards. See the realistic survival drama for yourself this award season and be the judge.
Watching The Revenant is a spectacular experience in itself, I tell you. Each frame is so beautiful, perfectly capturing nature's beauty and wrath, in all its purity..it is nothing short of breathtaking. The entire film(156 minutes)has been shot in natural light and in the silence of the theatre I could truly appreciate the impact of every movement onscreen. Leonardo Dicaprio has shown us his best yet, with a character he himself admits has been the most difficult to film in his career, what with director Alejandro G.Inaritu daringly venturing into the unexplored wild of Argentina,Canada and South Dakota, and half the crew deserting them on learning of the harsh conditions which they had to shoot in.
Tom Hardy is the impeccable villain ,all grit and no emotion(why does he always have to take up hateful characters? Seems to be awfully good at it too), who kills Glass's half-native son while the injured Glass helplessly watches on(one of the most heart wrenching scenes in the movie).
Just listening to the soundtrack evokes images of a desolate landscape stretching ahead into the horizon, almost oppressive silence and the loneliness that comes with it. Also discernible are the sounds of a crackling fire and the occasional wind. That is what makes the minimal music composed jointly by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner so intricately linked with the plot.
The film has already swept three Golden Globe Awards , five BAFTA Awards and has been nominated for 12 Academy Awards,including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (DiCaprio) and Best Supporting Actor (Hardy). For his performance, DiCaprio received the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama, the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, the Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Actor and the BAFTA Award for Best Leading Actor.
I felt guilty of the comforts available to me while watching the end result of the whole crew, about 15,000 people, working in -25 degree temperatures, going through hell to film just one and half hours everyday. Bravo, people! Your perseverance just might add to Dicaprio's laurels at the 2016 Academy Awards tomorrow. God knows he deserves it.
Just an aside,I am entirely avoiding the discussion regarding Leo's deserving the Oscar for Best Actor or not. That is up to the jury. And even if he does not win his sixth nomination, it does not matter since the world has already acknowledged his talent, to say the least. His choice of characters have always been off the beaten track and accompanied by an exemplary portrayal. All awards are more or less a hoax, anyway.
The direction, acting, cinematography, makeup,background score, and all the other aspects of this film fit together so well, you can't help but believe that the events portrayed are truly unfolding before your very eyes. When the lights dim and Dicaprio's face comes into focus(the flashback to when Glass's old camp was raided by the army and his wife was killed),wading through the river to hunt for pelts or when he rides off a cliff on a horse, you are hunting or plummeting with him.
I hated coming back to the real world after the final credits rolled by. All the light, the noise, the instant communication now available at our fingertips..I hated it. You see,man's problems are ever the same. In the nineteenth century(as depicted in The Revenant),civilisation was comprised of encampments in the wilderness - rangers, fur trappers, tribes like the Arikara hunting them to acquire pelts to exchange with the French nobility for arms and horses, and other native tribes like the Pawnee, who mingled with the other tribes to produce the so-called 'half-natives', like Glass's son, Hawk. Like Fitzgerald curses early in the movie about having no life, only a living,about the job being damned from the start, we see the bleakness of their lives. When the Arikara launch an attack on the temporary camp of the fur trappers headed by Captain Henry(Domhnall Gleeson),33 men are killed and the remaining 10 escape on a boat on an attempt to head back to camp at Fort Kiowa several miles West, on the Missouri river. En route, Hugh Glass,who knows the lay of the land best and is thus the accepted guide, gets mauled by a grizzly bear while venturing ahead alone. Just the weight of the massive beast knocks him down and tries to fight back in vain. The bear presently abandons its prey, only to be provoked by Glass's attempt to shoot it and then in an attempt to stab it to its end, Glass manages to shake him off ,though only for a moment- they encounter a slope and the bear's carcass drops on top of Glass's wasted body. There he lies, until the rest of the campers search him out and rescue him. The rest of the story follows the fur trappers loyally carrying Hugh on a temporary stretcher, and later abandoning the impractical idea.
As the ever bitter Fitzgerald put it, it would only slow them all down and get them killed. He hangs back, though, along with Hawk and Bridger(Will Poulter), when the captain offers to pay those who would tend to Glass for as long as necessary and then give him a proper burial, before catching up to the others on their way up the mountain. Fitzgerald ,of course, only does it for the money and when Hawk unwittingly comes in to see him choking his father to death, he reacts violently and gets killed.Glass can hardly breathe, is all covered in blood and dirt,and can only watch the torture of losing the only family left to him. When Bridger returns to camp from the river, Fitz makes up a story of them being pursued and makes a hurried departure,dragging the still alive(but barely)Glass to a messy grave.Painstakingly, inch by inch, gritting his teeth, moaning in unbearable pain, Dicaprio drags himself up and towards his son's corpse and lies there. He knows he need to move and grabbing whatever little supplies he had left(Fitz had taken the rifle; there were only the clothes and the water),he let the earth guide him forward, slowly gaining enough strength to walk with support , to hunt for food and water, and to hide when the Ree made themselves heard(he swims across a river when they catch up to him and gets caught in the current, but emerges alive, more or less. His need to avenge his son ultimately lead him back to camp. He had rescued the Arikara chief's daughter, Poqawa, from a Frenchman who wanted to rape her, and shortly after a lone White man approaches Captain Henry's camp with the water tumbler Bridger had left with him. The captain immediately launches a search party and they find Glass and take him back to camp and nurse his many wounds, which had partially healed owing to the treatment of a lone Pawnee tribesman, Hikuc, whom Glass had befriended n the wild but who was hanged by some French pelt hunters.Henry charges Bridger with treason and orders for him to be hanged,but Hugh later informs him that the kid had been scared into silence by Fitzgerald , who,being the coward he was, had already fled with the money to Texas, in order to "find a patch of land" and to reenlist to justify killing again.The captain, along with an insistent Glass set out to murder him, for leaving one of his men to rot in the forest ,but Henry ambushed by Fitz and killed. Glass pursues him and after a bloody duel in the unrelenting snow,throws him into the adjoining river. Fitzgerald mocked him to enjoy the revenge he had survived so many miles for, and Glass, remembering Hikuc, left it to the Creator to carry out justice. The final scene shoes him trudging up a snowy slope, newly injured, and hallucinating about his wife, yet again.
I did wish that they had shown him returning, victorious and still alive, to Fort Kiowa. I suppose the director meant for the end to be open to interpretation. However, the fact that 'the revenant' literally means "one who returns from the dead", gives me hope. After all, one of the most profound lines of the movie is when Dicaprio says, "I'm not afraid of dying anymore. I done it already."
Needless to say,the actors in supporting roles, a few of whom are Domhnall Gleeson and Will Poulter, have also done a great job.
There are subtle hints of Glass's daredevilry right from the beginning, in the form of his dead wife, who comes to him in dreams, egging him on to fight for life as long as he could draw out a breath. And then the lone Pawnee native, who offers him raw bison liver as food,and later, helpshis body heal, influence Hugh to leave revenge to the Creator.In the end, he throws an incapacitated Fitzgerald into a stream, and the Arikara on the opposite bank,finish the job.
I am ashamed to admit that I knew of the existence of the novel by Michael Punke only after watching the movie. Now that I have a virtual copy, I am definitely going to read it. It seems the movie is only loosely based on it,so I might take my own sweet time to start reading it,since I do not want to wipe out the story as told by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and the superb performances from my memory too soon.
Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is brilliant,and that is one of the additional things the film brought to light.
Since almost every movie of Leo's (and Iñárritu's,for that matter) is Oscar-worthy, you can be quite assured that they did not do it for the awards. See the realistic survival drama for yourself this award season and be the judge.
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