Kritiken

Swinging hard for the visionary and missing, The Revenant combines Andrei Rublev with Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan, unfurling winter panoramas in natural light and adding CGI animals... [It's] Klondike Kat crossed with a Matthew Barney film, dominated by Tom Hardy's distracting-entertaining Appalachian accent. One thing is certain: Iñárittu has finally solved the problem of how to film a realistic bear fight. The next cinematic problem he should tackle is screenwriting.

It's so ridiculously macho that parts of it are hilarious, in the way that certain R-rated 1980's action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger Sylvester Stallone are hilarious. It is, rather paradoxically, both austere and extravagant, embracing a highly concentrated, at times minimalist visual aesthetic while piling on the machismo.

...This is arguably The Revenant's greatest achievement: turning a derogatory term into an existential condition yielding a new visual field. Complementing and qualifying the film's spectacular vistas is a mode of seeing far more subdued: spare, deliberately unemotional, almost impersonal — the observational style of a bereaved eye.

Lubezki makes the camera twirl and gyrate, but for Malick the movement often *is* the action and runs the risk of obscuring the drama in favor of moods, tones, and ideas. By contrast, Inarritu's camera movements follow the action and subordinate it to a theatrical mode of performance (as in "Birdman")… Far from pursuing the boundary-less quasi-metaphysical connections of Malick's fluid images, Inarritu uses Lubezki's balletic camera work as a pictorial ornament to his bland theatrical stagings.

The world portrayed in The Revenant is gigantic: vast landscapes, mile-high trees, and infinite horizons. But the auteur of that vision isn't Iñárritu—it's cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki… As Lubezki has pointed out, digital still lacks film's dynamic range—yet the image resolution in The Revenant is phenomenal, even when the camera is moving quickly or acrobatically.

For better and for worse, there is relatively little artifice in The Revenant. DiCaprio's character lacks much detail, so we invest him with what we know of Leo himself; it's a real movie-star performance. That is both The Revenant's accomplishment and its curse.

What's best in this two-and-a-half hour film that feels much longer is Emmanuel Lubezki's gorgeously unhurried cinematography, accompanied by Ryuichi Sakamoto's ghostly score, and supplemented with atmospheric compositions by John Luther Adams, Messiaen, and others; as in Iñárritu's previous films, including Birdman and Babel, the soundtrack, with its repeated, unresolved chords, is crucial to the action, directing our emotional responses to some mystical realm.

So long as The Revenant sticks to [Glass'] extreme efforts, which at one point include taking refuge from a storm inside a dead horse's belly, it's gripping entertainment. The revenge story itself, on the other hand, never quite catches fire.

Iñárritu's film is a revenge parable that wears its beauty and its batshit-crazy backstory on its sleeve. But it's also clearly the work of a visionary director, one who saw a transcendental tale of man versus nature in the real-life Glass's journey, and went to insane lengths to find a form befitting of that deeply embedded material.

While Iñárritu and Lubezki wow in scenes that anyone working with similar money and in similar circumstances could hardly fail to make impressive, the handling of Glass's family history is a haze of jerky-tough platitudes and cribbed Malick-isms, arbitrarily flitted through in order to give Glass a motive for vengeance and to establish that, through his relations with the Native Americans, he is somewhat less unprincipled trash than the other Europeans in the wilderness.

The first time I saw The Revenant, I felt it was the movie of the year, the most beautiful and eloquent, as vital as the desperate breath of characters in the cold clouding the camera lens. I took it for granted as a box-office success and a contender for the Best Picture Oscar. Who had seen such marvels lately in a movie? ...I had to see the film again for that excitement to be challenged, and for the bleakness of The Revenant to strike home.

One of the most powerful, viscerally exciting, terrifying and beautiful films I've seen in a long time, it feels, at times, like *watching* Hemingway or Faulkner or Conrad... There's so much mystery and wonder here. As gloriously shot by that genius Emmanuel Lubezki, nature is its own character full of glory and full of hell -- and you can't solve nature.