THE REVENANT

THE REVENANT is a big budget, artsy, mixed message movie with strong Christian content combined with strong spiritualist content. The violence in THE REVENANT is too excessive, the cursing is anachronistic, and the movie is far too long with repeated scenes of the same type of graphic violence.

THE REVENANT tells the story of Hugh Glass, a guide for fur trappers in the Rockies in the 1820s. The fur trappers Glass was guiding abandoned him after a grizzly bear terribly mauled him, but Glass survived to have newspapers tell of his miraculous survival. His story became the subject of several books, the last of which is a 2002 novel by Michael Punke that re-imagines the story as a story of survival and revenge.

This movie version opens with Glass and the other fur trappers he’s leading being attacked by an American Indian tribe led by a chief whose daughter was kidnapped by other fur trappers. The Indians are brutal, and the trappers are no less brutal.

After the attack, Glass tries to lead the few survivors back to the nearest fort without their furs, which have been taken by the Indians to some French fur trappers, who are actually the ones with the chief’s daughter. In the middle of their grueling and scary attempt to get over the Rockies in the winter, Glass is attacked and mauled by a mother grizzly bear protecting her cubs.

The captain of the trading company, Andrew Henry, tries to take most of the men over the mountain without Glass as their guide. He pays three men to stay behind with Glass, who’s barely alive. One of the three men is Glass’s son and another is a young trapper. The third man is the villain, Fitzgerald, who’s been cursing and mocking God from the first scene.

Fitzgerald only stays behind for the money, but he finally gets bored and tells Glass, if he blinks, Fitzgerald will kill him and bury him so he can find peace with his God. When Fitzgerald tries to kill Glass, Hugh’s son, who’s half Indian, tries to save his father, but Fitzgerald kills him and leaves.

Somehow, though he’s alone and terribly wounded, Glass recovers, and he crawls through the woods. Now, the questions are: whether Glass can survive; whether the Indians will kill the other trappers; what will happen to Fitzgerald; and, whether Glass will be able to satisfy his desire for revenge against the evil Fitzgerald.

THE REVENANT ends when Glass remembers the words of his wife that revenge is God’s business. Even so, he throws the injured Fitzgerald into the river. However, this premise or theme gets lost in the movie. Thus, REVENANT also has the survival premise, the premise about the fur trapping industry of early America, the premise about the Native Americans, and many other minor premises, all of which should be integrated or discarded with careful editing.

Furthermore, although THE REVENANT has some strong Christian content and symbolism, it has equally strong spiritualist and atheist content. In fact, the Christianity is spotty, and plenty of occult Indian spiritualism competing with it. Moreover, Fitzgerald tells the mocking story that his father found a little sage tree and found god: a squirrel. His father eats god the squirrel in the tree. With great glee, Fitzgerald viciously mocks God and religion.

Aside from the gruesome violence and the abhorrent language, THE REVENANT is very limited by the lack of character arcs and monochromatic expressions of all the actors. For instance, Fitzgerald starts off as abhorrent and never has any character growth. Glass stays the same throughout the whole movie, with a slightly jumping character growth at the end. The photography, though beautiful, is also monochromatic, always dark, grey and foreboding.

The biggest problem with the movie is that it seems the writer and director didn’t know what they wanted. Did they want to show Glass surviving? Did they want to show a story of revenge overcome by God’s grace? Did they want to extol the virtues of Indian culture and alleged spiritual beliefs? Did they want to show how bad the fur trading companies were? All these themes are jumbled together in an episodic fashion.

With editing, THE REVENANT could have been a good movie, or they could have cut the budget severely and made the artsy movie they wanted to make. As it is, however, the movie’s current edit is neither here nor there.

For a better movie based on this same story, mature audiences might want to look up MAN IN THE WILDERNESS with Richard Harris and John Huston.