Movie Review: The Revenant

This week’s review is on The Revenant, which is supposed to be inspired by true events. But upon searching it up on Wikipedia, and the book on Amazon, it's apparently a work of fiction. Another reason for watching this movie is that an actress from my hometown is in it, and when that happens, it almost always makes it something worth checking out.

The movie starts with narration in a native language by (a female person, thinking it is Hugh Glass' wife played by Grace Dove). Afterwards, it moves to Hugh Glass (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his son, Hawk (played by Forrest Goodluck) hunting moose for skins. After shooting a moose and killing it, they take it back to their campsite to be skinned. Everyone at the campsite is skinning the animals they have killed and preparing the animal skins for trading. Shortly after, a group of natives storm the camp, shooting arrows and killing some of the men. The men in the hunting group fight back, but eventually have to flee, taking as many of the pelts as they can with them. We then find out that the natives are looking for their chiefs daughter, who was taken by a group of white men.

The men who survived and escaped in a boat soon decide to get off so that the natives have a harder time tracking them. One man, John Fitzgerald (played by John Hardy) argues with over doing this because he doesn't believe Hugh knows what's best to do. He is also very greedy and doesn't want to leave the pelts they managed to save behind. They decide to have a couple of men take the boat down stream without the pelts, where the natives later catch them. The remaining men bury the pelts to come back for later, then start walking through the forest. Hugh decides to go hunting while the others catch up. While he is out, he comes across a couple of bear cubs. He looks around, only to find no mother bear. The mother charges at Hugh, and they have a battle to the death.

The plot felt long at times. It was probably meant to be that way to represent his long struggle, but there were points where it dragged a little long during the 2 and a half hours of watching. It also seemed like the writer was trying to turn Hugh into a super human. Really, how much can one person take without dying?

The acting couldn't have been any better. I really commend Leonardo DiCaprio for the emotion and commitment to his character. I also think that Tom Hardy did a great job with his character as well. I will also say that the makeup artists did a great job on the wounds, scars, and other elements that brought the whole scenario to life. On a personal note for our home actress, Grace Dove, well done. Even though you were in very few scenes, you shined in all of them.

Overall, the story plot was a little slow, but the acting was much better than expected. Although it had quite a bit of gore, I would rate this movie 8.9/10.