Movie Review: The Revenant (English)

By now, we all know how The Revenant turned out for lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio (delivering a good if somewhat disconnected performance), don't we? In my opinion, if there was one movie that was crafted and engineered to impeccable precision (something akin to organised, poetic chaos), Alejandro G. Iñárritu's latest survival western film would be it. Don't get me wrong, The Revenant is breathtakingly shot (Emmanuel Lubezki, winning the third Oscar for his well-deserved camera wizardry), capturing the natural, unforgiving American landscape in all its stunning glory.

But the movie is also more shock than soul (not to mention, an Oscar vehicle), dramatising a grisly harrowing journey of survival and retribution that, after a bang of an opening, descends into a sequence of predictable hardships which loses all its steam and tension by the end of it because we know that the hero will return from the dead, surviving the ordeal. And also because he has to exact revenge on a fellow trapper (an excellent Tom Hardy, even if he half-mumbles through his dialogue) who leaves him for dead in the brutal cold after a fur-trapping expedition goes awry (and including but not restricted to being shred to ribbons in a bear attack). Relentlessly gruesome and unflinching, The Revenant is an endurance test... of patience that is.