Spoilers.
Set in the good old days when a man could trap beavers by the ton and a mountain of bison skulls makes a couple of cameos. Our hero, such as he is, is a Jeremiah Johnson/Grizzle Adams sort of fellow. The Revenant has a real throwback to the 1970s kind of feel to it. The evil white men are killing the locals and the wildlife for pure greed. Only Leonardo DiCaprio is a sort of good guy. He’s gone Native and has an Indain son by an Indian woman who was killed by what looked like a French soilder.
Ok, I’m not much of a historian, which is kind of a problem here. They never tell us when the story is set, where it takes place, or much of anything. We learn that Captain Levenworth is wandering around somewhere. We hear that the Pawnee and the Cree are the Native Americans of choice. It’s winter, as we see a lot of snow and a lot of near freezing to death moments. Guns are all flint locks of some sort, if that tells you anything.
The story is a simple revenge plot with a nice layer of White People Are Bastards dollopped on top. Not sure how they missed having a Slave make an appearence. Of course, white people murdering and raping Native Americans are mere side issues. Leo wants revenger on another white man.
The Revenant is filmed in Annoy-o-vision. The camera pans and zooms and makes gun barrels look twenty feet long and trees look a mile high. One gimmick that is used once or twice too often is having someone or some animal breath/bleed on the camera lens. It was kind of cute the first time, but once was enough. The dead wife going on about be strong like a tree got a bit old as well.
Like Dances With Wolves, The Revenant reminded me a lot of Little Big Man, the first great White People Are Bastards film I ever saw. That film made me want to invent a time machine and sink every ship from Europe before it could make it to the New World. The Revenant was fun, in a lets see how long it take Leo to drag himself a hundred miles kind of way. It was down right silly when he wins a hand to hand battle with a grizzle bear.
Is this the role that will land Leo his Oscar? I doubt it. I didn’t really care about his tortured mountain man, or anyone else here. There was a lot of violence, but none of it meant much. The Revenant isn’t quite up there with Little Big Man or Death Wish.
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