The Revenant (2015)

Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu

Writer: Mark L. Smith, A.G. Iñárritu

Production Co.: New Regency Pictures, et al.

Starring: Leonardo Dicaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson

   Simply, it can be regarded as a "sequel of The Avatar in the early days of America". The hero is a man on the border between civilization and wilderness. This outsider, once punished by the mother nature, seeks to avenge his only son. There are no hidden clue or reversal, but animalistic suffering and killing.

   The most important point in this film is the gravity of life and death. Alejandro G. Iñárritu delivers this through three ways: long take, close up, and special effects. First, long take shots confer verisimilitude to the actions. Especially, the first long take shot in the earliest battle is significant because the camera presents ephemerality of life by mingling from the killer to the killed. Secondly, the director employed a number of close up shot to make spectator look around multiplicity of characters' appearance. By this, he suggests us to focus on their sufferings and anger instead of the story or tempo. In my point of view, this is a similar strategy that was used in Les Misérables, which drew its narrative with close up and music scores to encourage narrative-oriented auds. However, it is not reasonable if we do not pay equal attention to VFX (stands for Visual Effects) because that brings reality and sensation throughout the film. It is mandatory to witness the scene where Glass (Leonard DiCaprio) faces his first adversity while leading his fellows back to the town. What VFX bring ultimately is brutality of human beings.

   Basically, its semantic elements make it plausible to categorize this film to the Western. As I mentioned above, Glass is posited between two different groups. However, because of the brutality that is brought by VFX, the distinction between wilderness and civilization is blurred. As a result, it leads us to consider what civilization is and what a human being is. In addition to this, Iñárritu added a religious message on top of his western story by comparing human's vulnerability and overwhelming Providence. Providence is evident in several points in which it is hard to explain how Glass's life is saved. On the other hand, any human values - violence, contract, business, and so on - are not effective to bind the characters and to bring peace. Consequently, unlike a typical Western hero who retrieves peace by violence, Glass finds his peace in god (not God). This film alludes contemporary circulation of violence all over the world.

   It generates tremendous interest if DiCaprio will finally win best actor Oscar. In fact, I doubt it. It is difficult to distinguish actor's passion and character's perfection. Although DiCaprio went through various obstacles, what I mainly witnessed from Glass are yelling, groaning, mourning, staring, fighting. Maybe this negative feeling is due either to the frequent usage of foreign languages or to the guy who intermittently kicked my chair from the back row.