4. ...And It Fails To Find Profundity In That Bleakness
Cathartic suffering has been ample territory for film-makers since the beginning of the form. Notable great examples over the years include The Shawshank Redemption, My Left Foot, 127 Hours and Into The Wild. You could argue that none of these films are as overtly horrifying as The Revenant, but you could also argue that all of them have much more to say about what it means to be human, and what it means to be a human that's suffering. There are several reasons for this. For a start, The Revenant is obsessed with surface artistry. None can deny the sheer, overwhelming beauty of Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography, for which he was rightly nominated for an Academy Award. But gorgeous scenery alone is not a statement; it's supposed to complement or emphasize one. A dozen wide shots of snowy mountains and dense forests doesn't equate to intellectual commentary. Then there's the disjointed dream sequences and visions: every so often Hugh Glass will dream of his dead son or see the spectre of his deceased wife. It's understandable the director Alejandro Inarritu needed narrative material since DiCaprio spends so much screen time alone, but they're so frequent and so overtly symbolic that they quickly display their hollowness. One particularly bad example sees DiCaprio wander up to a church (the film is about suffering not just physically but spiritually, get it?), see his son Hawk and then wind up hugging a tree. There's nothing particularly profound in any of this, and it's so unsubtle that it comes across as superficial.
