The Revenant

So intensely destructive that at the very end, I felt like Glass himself. Broken, torn apart, utterly ruined, down to the marrow and bone. But unlike him, I would give up practically instantly and just wait for death. He crawls, struggles, and in various croaky ways tries to reach his archetypal goal through Leonardo DiCaprio's thrilling interpretation, to the point where even the winter wind on the way back from the cinema felt like the most pleasant spring breeze. I love the classic concept of the western genre, but this turning of traditions upside down needs to happen once in a while in every genre. Especially when the key scenes (the she-bear, the river, the bisons) are already iconic images from the moment of their debut. A magnificent epic and the most intimate rebirth in one. (01/14/2016)

As long as during the first 30 minutes we capture the amazing promo reel of Lubezki's camera, which equilibristically flows through the space between panoramic and contact shots, it's captivating. But then comes the need to tell a story and work with the characters, and the master of shallowness Alejandro is suddenly back with everything that it encompasses. The means of storytelling diverts attention from what is told to us. The film has an incredibly-compiled screenplay full of coincidences, which is supposed to be based on ultra-realism, but in fact is constantly slipping out of it towards an attempt at a metaphysical anti-western. The symbolic plane, the game with landscape and flashy symbols, is so superficial and clueless that it’s shameful. Although Leo breathes like a frightened mule and practices the crawling lessons he learned in The Wolf of Wall Street, he basically has no acting to do (I was almost sorry for him during the scene in the ruined temple). The film becomes a superficial high school exercise in Jack London's tenacity, which, thanks to a number of physical details, unfortunately grows into a parody of itself - Glass is Iron Man between trappers and Meresiev of the 19th century. It is not a celebration of the tenacity of man, but of the superfluous ego of a creator who puts himself above the story and the character as a dubious god. Revenant is a rare spectacle, an intellectual exploitation and a film that brings nothing more than magnificent filming of landscapes and action. Otherwise, it's a boring camping guide and a college of starting fires. Where there is nothing, not even the tinder burns. Metaphysics for the poor from the grizzly among the overrated filmmakers. P.S. The bear takes it all, the best CGI scene ever. [50%] (01/05/2016)

There aren't many of these realistically dirty, narratively unkempt films that feel like the filmmakers have actually gone back 200 years, and actually I can't remember any from the last few years. Raw action, where you can feel the blood and pain, physical contact fights taken in one long shot, and beautiful visual compositions of breathtaking nature; and snow and mud and filthy actors everywhere – the film crew must have had their fun too. The simple story doesn't hurt at all, because it goes to the heart of the characters and their physical and mental hardships. The complete opposite of the mannerist, self-absorbed Birdman, where I didn't care about the characters' fates at all. Together with Sicario, the best film of 2015. (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)