I watched the Revenant last night. First time I’ve seen it. Wow.
It’s a bit of a throwback for me, as I grew up captivated by movies about raw survival in the wilderness like A Man Called Horse, Jeremiah Johnson, Hell in the Pacific, and The Naked Prey. And here is such a tale in modern cinematic expression.
The story is great, castings are outstanding and the performances are all excellent, and the cinematography is just off the chain. The shots of the wilderness are breathtaking. The action in all the native-American attacks on European fur traders, the bear mauling scene, and the final battle between Glass and Fitzgerald are all incredibly intense and graphic.
In contrast to more classical feeling Hollywood movies about the frontier wilderness The Revenant uses a kind of hyper-realism—which now that I think about it, is a form of stylization all its own. The movie brooks no romanticized fantasization about what the culture of European descendant settlers was like and what that lifestyle out in the wilderness was like. I have no earthly idea just how savage, brutal, racist, lowbrow, feral, and so on it was, but the movie goes a long way to show how gritty and at times horrifying that life perhaps was. On the other hand it does show that the noble and prosocial instincts are struggling for survival as well in the social environment as well, as we see in Glass and his son Hawk, the native that helps Glass, the Captain, and Bridger.
Evidently the character “Bridger” must be a nod the famous mountain man “Jim Bridger.” The story for this movie is based on a
true event with which Jim Bridger may have played a role similar to the young man in the film.
This is based on watching survivalist shows that were popular about one to two decades ago, so take with a grain of salt: But one slight criticism on the realism of the film is that in a climate that far north to be getting wet by wading in water would have risked hypothermia. There’s a just a lot of scenes of people getting their clothing wet! In reality they would have had to dry the clothes out by the fire. It’s fine the movie chooses not to show that, but it’s a slight break with the otherwise brutally frank realism.
Anyway this movie is a banger. I’m not sure if it’s a film that I’ll want to rewatch a lot like I would Jeremiah Johnson. But it’s definitely a great film in subgenre of historical epic for the American frontier. Which is a subcategory of western as well.