Two and a half hours is far too much time to follow a character who crawls and stumbles their way through the wilderness without saying very much. To his credit, Alejandro Inarritu knows this, and so he added plenty of other material in order to try and keep the film interesting and well-paced. The issue with this material is that it's mostly only there to prop up the movie until it can return to Hugh Glass. Take all of the stuff about the Native American Elk Dog's search for his daughter Powaqa. Scenes of there search are interspersed throughout the movie, but they're incredibly two-dimensional, and don't really amount to anything more than the same we must find my daughter! over and over again. On top of that, the two end up reuniting off-screen, so it's clear the audience's emotional focus isn't supposed to be on their relationship. As if this isn't already clear enough, it transpires at the close of the film that Powaqa is only really there so that Glass doesn't have to kill Fitzgerald himself. There's also the extensive scenes of the main party of trappers travelling back to Fort Kiowa, which don't provide any additional information and largely feature a nameless cast of characters who the film doesn't really touch upon again in any significant way. And as mentioned in the previous entry, the flashbacks and dream sequences withhold coherent back story in exchange for giving audiences something new to look it. So much material is expendable, padding out the movie until the next DiCaprio scene.
