The Revenant

I was waiting for something in the style of the Black Robe in combination with McCarthy's Bloody Meridian and in a way I got it. Sadly, there was a lot of kind of mystically symbolic insertions that were frequent, pointless and above all unintentionally stupid. It would have been even better if it had kept only in the department of inhospitable wilderness, pragmatic rough trappers, Indians on the warpath, survival, endless snowy distances, howling winds, slow pace. Although it undoubtedly has a few weak or unnecessary scenes, but when it's good (which is true for most of the footage), it's damn good. Largely thanks to the raw atmosphere, poor performance of lame Leo, amazing (however traditional) grumbling Hardy and even Gleeson is surprisingly a great fit. And we need to mention the camera since there has not been anything better since There Will Be Blood. Overall, I really enjoyed it, although I had considerable reservations. (01/13/2016)

One hundred and fifty minutes of art that offers real physical adventure in only two battles. There's clearly something wrong with a film where you spend most of the runtime thinking about the freezing crew on the other side of the camera. I haven't seen something so "wanted" in a long time. Just hand over the coveted statue and let this one fall in as technically honest and damn difficult filmmaking, which perhaps nobody even cares about in the end. PS: Hardy beats DiCaprio by a dead bear and half a horse. (01/02/2016)

Revenant is undoubtedly a great movie. It has genius camera, brutally frozen locations, two absolutely perfect scenes and Leonardo DiCaprio, whose performance is an acting orgasm like never before. If not before, then for this performance he simply has to get the Oscar award. Personally, I think that his showing off is beyond the line. The less talking there is, the more action is happening on the screen. Leo is gutting a horse to hide in his internals or eating raw meat to survive. Plus, he survives a lot ofunbelievable stuff that no average citizen of the Czech Republic would be able to survive. All of that for the most classic reason of all – for revenge. It’s a shame that the creators stretched the story so much. They could’ve spared us some of the flashbacks. Two and a half hours is a lot of time for a story like that. Anyway, I admit that the first scene of the attack of the Native Americans and then the scene of the bear attacking Leo will stick in my memory as the best I’ve seen in a pretty long time. (01/19/2016)

Well, I was 100% sure that I would be delighted and I was already formulating enthusiastic compliments in my head. And then nothing. Revenant is a great ninety-minute survival movie that unfortunately last 150 minutes. The rest is filled with ambition supported with shallow Indian mysticism. The attempts at transcendental ideas unfortunately lead to nowhere, they are just Iñarritu confidently scratching the surface. It’s not only that they don’t work, but they also end up utterly harming the core story and its characters. I didn’t see Hug Glass on the screen even for a moment. It’s always Leonardo DiCaprio performing art under Iñarritu’s direction. Disappointed as hell and the current 83% in view of the 66% for Birdman is a bad joke. (02/02/2016)

Stunning cinematography, atmospheric music, a great Tom Hardy and some riveting scenes. But if the protagonist crawling through the woods for those 156 minutes had been someone I cared even a little bit about, I probably would have had a lot more fun. A good and in some ways exceptional film that I never want to see again in my life. (01/06/2016)