Director Alejandro González iñárritu and actor Leonardo dicaprio were on set
Following birdman's Oscars, Alessandro Gonzalez Iñárritu brought a new film in which the director's assertiveness juxtaposed with the abstraction of the script. Leonardo DiCaprio contributed one of the least delicate performances of his career.
The first thing that makes "The Revenant" most boring is precisely the performance that made Leonardo win the Oscar. Oscar-winning performances must be either vicious or twisted, appearing one after another as they experience mud, snow, glaciers, and even the bodies of dead horses. This is the sadness of the acting career, but also the misunderstanding of the actors themselves, especially excellent actors like Leonardo, who can only be praised for this kind of performance.
In addition, The Revenant is offensive and lackluster. Disgust abounds: from action, emotion, creativity, to framing, sound effects are all like a fish in the mouth. Emphasis, repeated cycles, layers of stacking to create effects, is the Iñárritu directorial style (such as "Birdman"), and in this era of winning by quantity, it seems that "the more the merrier" is a market iron rule, all the relationships in the world can not be excluded, coupled with the thunder pressure of advertising, the ultimate goal of the production is nothing more than to occupy the brains of others.
Dehumanize
The story of "The Revenant" is born out of real events, which is originally quite interesting, but the way it is told is too stupid - not because of innate stupidity, but deliberately. In other words, it is too much force and desperate. That seems to be the fun part of this boring film.
The film is by no means a Western, as wikipedia has defined it. Westerns are the narration, rendering, and mythological writing of the American creation process, which do not provide the truth of history, but are correct and efficient communication mediums, witnessing the national leap of a community. Beginning in the 1960s, fading Westerns began to portray the antithesis of heroic legends, reminding people that such democracies were often based on killing and enslavement, at the expense of massive and brutal violence.
Rooted in the history of a country, this genre is rich in complex connotations and diverse forms of expression, attracting many boys to become cowboys in the 20th century, and once swept the world.
It's a human and political history, and The Revenant is irrelevant. The film's history and geography are far from the context of human society. The film goes to great lengths to make the construction of human nature disintegrate and establish the relationship between the animal world, in which the animal nature is not defined as animal nature, but completely dehumanized.
The use of wild and natural lenses, images of dreams, and incessant howls and whispers belong to the new age mysticism, which has been seen in Tyros Malik's films in the past decade. But Iñárritu was not shy about picking up people's teeth. His footage is filled with the thrill of small human beings lost in the vastness of the world, but they are not intended to reflect on the place of human beings in the universe or make any comparisons. He's just trying to create a vertigo-to-the-extreme nothingness, better than Gravity—and at this point, Gravity is full of chores from the families of the astronauts who were shipwrecked.
Pure abstraction
Instead, the interesting thing about the new film is the nihilistic part, and it's a bet that it will grab the audience's attention — or people will come up with "acting" as a reason, but that's not really convincing. This nothingness has nothing to do with the wilderness, because the furs and various atrocities of the animals that appear in the film are enough to express this barbarism . From Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) to Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980), American cinema has spared no effort in the barbarism of its own history — from "The New York Gangster" to "The Wolf of Wall Street," which Leonardo himself has shown in Martin Scorsese's films.
From Jeremiah Johnson (1972) to Dances with Wolves (1990), one can see the contrast between nature and wilderness. In The Revenant there is neither thought nor language, just as nature, animals, snow or mountains are nothing. Vegetation, Indians, bears, rivers, and hunters all swell under a senseless mixture (greed, totem belonging, revenge), coming from or going, pointing to no space or individual.
That's where snow comes in. Many Westerns or space films use snow in contrast to another tool of reality abstraction: the desert. But the snow in the film is not a challenge or other mystery, just a scavenger of the film's advancement, in contrast, another non-Western film at the beginning of the year, Tarantino's "Eight Wicked Men", although also boring, but slightly superior: the latter uses snow as a powerful prop for the character to portray ink, although the way of holding it is not interesting, but it is still targeted.
Survival game
As the film progresses, the mystery of the title is solved, which is not a Western or a ghost film. It is not the rebirth of anyone in the North American forest who was abandoned by hunters but survived, because he is not anyone at all: he does not fit the "human" setting, and the human beings who "come back from the dead" or escaped from danger and survived in other films are not like this. In this film, "No One" is not a character, or a character construct like in 2001: A Space Odyssey or director Sergio Leone: The Revenant refuses to define the character.
The conclusion is not difficult to draw. "The Revenant" is 2 hours and 35 minutes long, the lineup is huge and the technical means are numerous, but in fact, it is not even a movie, at best, it is just a survival game on the big screen, as if in a video game, the characters disappeared. This is the diametrically opposed to Garth Van Sant's film Gerry (2002), which starts with the abstract appearance of a video game and depicts two protagonists lost in the desert, thus more realistically digging into the depth of the characters' survival.
In the final analysis, it is still the online "Little Lee Red Carpet Runaway" game that hits the nail on the head. In this video, a talented actor transforms into a fictional character. But if you want to say that there is a lack of characters in the film, behind the "game" of "The Revenant" is the creator (translator's note: the original French lowercase créateur), sorry, is the capital "Creator" (Translator's Note: the French original capital créateur, also refers to the Creator). At the end of the film, the creator signed the film with his own name: he was Iñárritu himself. His extraterrestrial savior perfectly created a meaningless and emotionless void, and pushed forward step by step until the end, and he himself seemed to think of himself as a God.
(Original title: "Vacuum Pump" of "The Revenant")
Editor's Note: Vacuum pump is a kind of machinery for creating vacuum, which can discharge or absorb air from a closed or semi-enclosed space to achieve the relative vacuum of local space.
Translator: Duga | Proofreader: Juliet