The Revenant
The shaggiest of shaggy dog story, it takes that premise and runs with it from the Missouri river all the way to Klondike. Worth it to break out of my Alejandro G. Iñarritu self imposed ban, barely, it’s very pretty.
I like most of this, but it’s ruined by the most bullshit fourth wall breaking crap ever, always mucking up the lens with fluids, the fake one shot scenes.
And that ending is absolute bullshit, how the fuck do you ruin that? Seconds of self indulgence soiling nearly three hours of beautiful shots.
The whole thing is just an update on Dances With Wolves, inheriting the entire icky-ness of White dudes going native. Hell, that shit was already being mocked by Mark Twain, it’s not the woke mob cancelling it. It’s not even Jeremiah Johnson, not Apocalypto.
I thought the bear bit was a kind of spoiler, or inserted in some other context, but it’s really not, it’s the start of the plot.
Our protagonist follows the rules, if it’s brown, settle down, but he gets mauled anyway. That triggers some miraculous recovery at the hands of a rich guy with a lot of nobless oblige. This seems to be an Iñarritu staple.
The peers are mostly red shirts, except the evil Tejano poor, and the goody two shoes woke moral centre. They are lured with some preposterous amount of money to take care of the wounded, but the goody two shoes would stay for free.
The opportunist poor guy shanks the protagonist’s son, feigns ignorance and controls the other guy like it’s nothing. Even in situations where he is free to denounce it, he doesn’t.
That subplot is not fully resolved, I really wanted to know more about the goody two shoes Bridger. Hell, most characters are underdeveloped, even the protagonist and the main villain.
I’m assuming they work for the Hudson Bay corporation, indirectly, but this is never mentioned. The other bit with the bison skull pyramid seems anachronistic.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.