The Revenant Movie Summary
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Entertainment grade: B–
History grade: C–
For this Revenant, sometimes dead is better. Some films entertain through their artistic vision – perhaps a breath-taking vision of a futuristic world or a clever influx of innovative camera movements weaving in and out of frame in effort to keep us at the edge-of-our-seats. The Revenant movie review: Leonardo DiCaprio gives this film all he has got The Revenant movie review: Leonardo DiCaprio, as DiCaprio does, gives this film all he has got, and more, as he crawls, strips, grunts and grates, and is butchered and butchers in return, for revenge.
This article contains spoilers.
Hugh Glass was a frontiersman working in the upper Missouri river area in the early years of the 19th century. On a fur trapping expedition in 1823, he was attacked and mauled by a grizzly bear.
Violence
Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is one of a group of men finishing up a fur trapping expedition in the wilderness. They are attacked by Ree (Arikara) warriors. Whoosh! Someone gets impaled on a spear. Bang! Someone gets shot off his horse. Crack! Someone’s bones shatter. There’s an unflinching close-up of an arrow thwacking into a face, a gun butt bashing into a face, a flying kick to a face. A horse gets shot in the face. It’s exceptionally well choreographed and filmed.
The Revenant review – gut-churningly brutal, beautiful storytelling
This scene is based on a real-life incident: William H Ashley and Andrew Henry (the latter played by Domhnall Gleeson in the film) set up the Rocky Mountain Fur Company in 1822. In June 1823, Ashley’s band of around 70 men was attacked by Arikara warriors – they estimated around 600, though in the film it’s more like a dozen. Various accounts suggest that between 12 and 18 of Ashley’s men were killed.
Characters
In the film, 10 men get away. Among them are Captain Henry, Glass, Glass’s son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) and trappers John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) and Jim Bridger (Will Poulter). They have a conversation, but it’s all so extravagantly mumbled that it’s hard to work out what’s going on. Fitzgerald is fighty and racist, so he’s the baddie. Glass is the goodie, because he loves his son (who is half-Pawnee) in a gruff, manly way that involves telling him off a lot. The backstory about Glass’s love for a Pawnee woman is fiction. It has been suggested the real Glass had such a relationship, but there’s no firm evidence – and no evidence that he had any children.
Wildlife
As the men make their way through a forest, Glass happens upon two bear cubs and their angry mama. If you felt wan after the face-smashing scene at the start, reach for the smelling salts. Chomp! Growl! Shake! The bear sniffs him to see if he’s dead, then jumps up and down on his back. Splinter! Howl! Slash! Glass shoots the bear. That really gets on its wick. It tries to rip his throat out. He stabs it in the neck. It flops on him and dies heavily, squishing him like a punctured bouncy castle full of blood.
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The cinema audience is by this point laughing, half in horror and half because the scene goes on for so long that it becomes comical. Anyway, while historians are not certain of the precise details, the real Glass did get into a fight with a real bear, some time in August 1823.
Murder
The men find Glass in a rum old state. Captain Henry pays Fitzgerald, Bridger and Hawk to stay behind until it is time for Glass’s inevitable burial. When the captain leaves, Fitzgerald tries to bump Glass off. Hawk interrupts, so Fitzgerald bumps him off instead. This didn’t happen in real life, because Hawk didn’t exist. In the film, the ailing Glass sees Fitzgerald kill his son, giving him an extra motivation to stay alive and seek revenge. When Fitzgerald persuades Bridger to bury Glass alive and abandon him, you know Glass isn’t going to go quietly.
Survival
The real Glass survived his abandonment and dragged his battered body over hundreds of miles of terrain in pursuit of the men who left him for dead. Though he could read and write, Glass never set his story down in his own hand. It was first published by another writer in The Port Folio, a Philadelphia journal, in 1825. It may well have been embroidered then. It has been embroidered many times since.
Hardship
Where Was The Revenant Movie Filmed
The film has invented some extra obstacles for Glass: it is snowing throughout, even though in real life his trek took place between August and October; the Arikara track him and chase him into a tree; he has to hollow out a dead horse to make himself a sleeping bag. It’s brilliantly filmed, but the characterisations and dialogue don’t match the sophistication of the visuals. Moreover, by the second lingering closeup of a horse’s eye or the sixth epic landscape shot with four-fifths sky and one-fifth land, even those sophisticated visuals begin to feel repetitive. As for the ending, it has been changed in one significant way: in real life, nobody got killed.
Verdict
The Revenant is an impressive film inspired by Glass’s real-life story, but lays it on a bit thick and ends up curiously unmoving. The whole thing is begging to be sped up into a two-minute YouTube video set to Benny Hill music.