Director: Alejandro G. Inarritu
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy
The Revenant is brilliant and frustrating. While watching it I was alternately rapt and bored, witnessing some moments that verged on genius and others which were sunk by their artificial profundity. That's the thing with filmmaker Alejandro Inarritu's work, though; he tends to make films that come just this close to greatness without quite leaving you with anything to hold on to afterwards. You watch his work and marvel at the technical prowess on display, but there's an emptiness at the core that prevents it from resonating. The first twenty to thirty minutes of The Revenant are amazing, and it is intermittently great from that point on, but by the time it was over, I was more than ready for it to be over and that was before it arrived at its final shot, which actually made me roll my eyes it was so trite. However, when you consider that I would gladly sit through all of the film's lesser moments just to see its great ones again, I suppose you can chalk that up to a victory on the film's part.
