Alejandro G. Iñárritu communicates powerfully in two registers throughout “The Revenant” – visceral violence and serene stillness. Working with director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki, he masterfully navigates between these two extremes. When the film needs to do so, it shifts registers from portraying the beauty of nature like Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” to showing how that same environment can harshly impose its fierce will such as in Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”
Lubezki enhances the naturalism by ditching the fluorescent lamps and employing only the light present at the shoot. Additionally, he stages many an elaborate long take with Iñárritu meant to keep the intensity moving forward as if the lens of the camera was the eyes of the audience. When these two elements mesh perfectly, “The Revenant” provides some of the most pulse-pounding, adrenaline-pumping cinema of recent memory.
But there are times in the mad rush of blood to the head where Iñárritu seems in a little bit over his head. As with “Birdman,” his reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. Though his movies all but scream their production values, they never come out quite as important or revolutionary as he thinks they are. For example, the tracking shots convey the intricacy of their planning as much as they provide an immersive plunge into the unforgiving American frontier. Each moment of greatness has some accompanying gloat visible down the road.
Leading man Leonardo DiCaprio matches this pattern in many ways. He stars as fur trapper Hugh Glass, enshrouded in a Kurtz-like mystery to his group of fellow hunters. They know little about him other than that he has spent a great deal of time among the indigenous people in the Louisiana Purchase, which thus makes him more in harmony with their harsh surroundings. Just how deep that connection with the land goes, however, gets a trial by fire as the team’s leader, Tom Hardy’s ruthless John Fitzgerald, essentially leaves Glass for dead in the brutal winter.
Marshall and the Movies 
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