3.75/5. I walked out of this one saying to my friends, "that was pretty good for a 10 hour film." It was a long film that wanted you to feel the length. At times, that made it feel appropriately epic, but at others that made it feel like it was alternatively being indulgent or spinning its wheels. The Revenant started strong and ended fairly strong, but had a lot of fat in the middle.
But if there's one thing it deserves credit for, it's the cinematography and production. There are so many beautiful images throughout the film, whether it be a swooping shot of a snow-covered vista, or the slow lurch of the camera as it follows Glass crawling across the ground, or the Saving Private Ryan-esque battle sequence near the beginning of the film. It was visually arresting from the word go, even if the story and pacing couldn't always keep up.
Oddly enough, the film I found myself thinking about while watching The Revenant was Mad Max: Fury Road. Both feature a fairly straightforward narrative intended to impart broad themes, but make their bones with their visual storytelling and sensibilities, bolstered by strong individual performances that vary from the depictions of quiet strength to bombast. To that end, both films eschew exposition and narrative complexity in a bid to allow the images and the performances to convey the story.
There are certainly parallels between DiCaprio in The Revenant and Hardy in Mad Max, both playing largely silent, wounded animals who are haunted by their pasts. And the key feature in each is the aesthetic choices made by the folks behind the films, where both Miller and Inarritu communicate their themes most forcefully in the visuals they craft rather than dialogue, despite notable moments in both films where the characters' lines hit the major ideas of the film in a less-than-subtle manner. There are obviously significant distinctions between the two films in areas like tone and pacing, and Inarritu and Miller have different goals and styles, but they go about accomplishing and employing them in a strikingly similar fashion.
That said, I wasn't particularly blown away by DiCaprio's performance here. It was good, there's no question, but I've more or less had my fill of DiCaprio playing these intense, perpetually perturbed men with something in their past gnawing on them. He knows how to play those notes well, but I'm just kind of inured to it at this point. By the same token, the film includes too many vignettes of Glass's survival, with many of them being too long as well. Many did little to advance the narrative or the character (the big exception being Glass and his Pawnee companion catching snowflakes in one of the film's most endearing moment), which is fine in small doses. Giving the audience a chance to just spend time with a character can work toward making them invested in his fate when the time for the narrative fireworks come. But a lot of those scenes in The Revenant felt like indulgence or even just fumfering around. They were a part of the film that cried out for a montage that never came.
Hardy, on the other hand, does a fantastic job at Fitzgerald, who sells the character's attitude and role in the story almost from the minute he's on the screen, and makes Fitzgerald's nigh-heartless, mercenary pragmatism and his open racism feel lived-in and true to the character from the getgo.
Inarrito spends a lot of time seizing on a fairly simple theme, represented with his wind and tree metaphor, and building up an elaborate, somewhat pretentious infrastructure around it. There's value in simplicity in story and theme at times, but it feels like he's trying to take something straightforward and telescope it out to unsupportable complexity and weight here, and the film suffers for it.
Overall it's a generally good, but rarely great movie, with some serious and stultifying missteps in its lengthy, middle act. It's consistently a feast for the eyes, and the visual storytelling is close to impeccable, but the ideas involved are fairly shallow and trumped up, and the performances can only do so much to make up for its flaws.
Argo expertly builds tension and makes you wonder whether the mission will succeed. Enjoyable, Suspenseful and well-acted.
A poor performance from a great cast.
The script didn't help.
Wow. A must see for any fans of A Scanner Darkly and/or Grant Morrison.
Mediocre, at best
It's so intentionally cheesy and cliche.... I LIKED IT!
Superb film and just as good as pumping iron.
Mickey Rourke is brilliant as the narrator
Not understanding why this film is so highly rated! It's one of the worst films I've ever seen.
(+ also. this is the only movie I ever re-watched in it's entirety with the director's commentary track on, just to hear what Mendes was thinking and to prove my points to my girl :)
