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2016 Oscar Predictions: Who Will Win?
Feb 26, 2016 10:15 AM EST
Leonardo DiCaprio will finally get his Oscar, but will his film prevail too? For the first time in years, we've got a three-horse Best Picture race, between The Revenant, The Big Short and Spotlight after they each took key industry wins. But each ha… Read more
BAFTA Awards: The Revenant Wins Top Prizes
See the full list of winners
Box Office: Deadpool Earns Record-Breaking $135 Million
Prepare for a lot more R-rated superhero movies
DGA Awards: Alejandro Iñárritu Makes History with The Revenant Win
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Orange Is the New Black, Spotlight Top SAG Awards
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2016 SAG Awards Predictions: Who Will Win?
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The Revenant Tops Oscar Nominations
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The Revenant (Clean Trailer) - Official Trailer
02:13 —Leonardo Dicaprio On Why He Wanted To Part Of The Film - Behind the Scenes
00:31 —The Revenant - Trailer 2
02:38 — The new film from award-winner Alejandro González Iñárritu concerns the frontiersman, Hugh Glass, who in the 1820s set out on a path of vengeance agai (more…)Actors Ensemble Featurette (UK) - Behind the Scenes
02:00 —WatchSee all »
The RevenantFXIn 1820s America, frontiersman Hugh Glass is betrayed and left for dead by his fur-trapping party after he is viciously attacked by a grizzly bear. However, Glass survives and sets out to seek revenge.
The RevenantFXIn 1820s America, frontiersman Hugh Glass is betrayed and left for dead by his fur-trapping party after he is viciously attacked by a grizzly bear. However, Glass survives and sets out to seek revenge.
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Back in 2011, trailers for Joe Carnahan’s The Grey had audiences primed to see an over-the-top adventure movie prominently featuring Liam Neeson taking on a pack of vicious wolves with his bare hands. The actual film was a surprise: rather than a gritty, macho, man vs. wild showdown, it’s a visually lovely meditation on life, as mused over by people under constant threat of death. And the promised wolf showdown never arrives — the trailer’s image of Neeson launching himself toward the pack is the final shot of the movie. The Grey is powerful and haunting; it just isn’t the movie that the trailer promised.
Fortunately for wildlife-brawl fans, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s bloody new drama The Revenant reads like the version of The Grey teased in those trailers. It’s just as chilly and striking, and just as focused on pack dynamics among men trying to assert control over a desperate situation by asserting control over each other. And while it may not be as thought-provoking, it certainly delivers on the bare-handed bear-fight front.
Iñárritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith (Vacancy) based the screenplay on Michael Punke's The Revenant, a novel inspired by the life of frontiersman Hugh Glass. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Glass, a hired guide helping a large band of fur trappers navigate the wilds of the Americas in the early 1800s. (The specific setting isn't identified, but Glass' real-life story took place in South Dakota, and the Arikara Natives he encounters are indigenous to North Dakota.) Glass is a soft-spoken man who seems to live slightly outside the physical world; like a character in a Terrence Malick movie, he seems perpetually dazed by nature, which he regards in a constant ecstasy of wonder. And like a Malick character, he's haunted by whispered voices. Throughout the film, he repeatedly re-experiences a metaphorical story his Pawnee wife told their son Hawk about the enduring power of a tree in a storm. And he helplessly flashes back over and over to the day a military troop murdered her and her tribe. Cradling his badly burned son Hawk afterward, he told him: 'As long as you draw breath, you fight.'
Those words come back to haunt him when the Arikara attack his trapping group in the dead of winter, killing more than 30 men. Glass and his beloved son, now a sullen, seething adult (and played by Forrest Goodluck) are among the 10 survivors. So are young greenhorn Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), weaselly John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), and their commander, Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson, lately of Ex Machina and Frank). Then a bear mauls Glass, leaving him a mutilated, immobile wreck. Fitzgerald promptly takes the opportunity to betray him in a variety of tremendously personal ways. Left for dead, Glass has to haul himself out of a shallow grave (hence the title of the film), and come seeking revenge.
Stories of dogged, bottomless will have always directly touched the American psyche
The fact that this is a nominally true story doesn't make it seem any less unlikely. Iñárritu is mythmaking here, and everything about the plot falls somewhere between an Old West tall tale and a lurid, wallowing two-fisted revenge story. Narratively, this is essentially Point Blank with longer guns and longer beards, or Kill Bill without the martial arts or constant film references. Or if you like, a North American The Count Of Monte Cristo, which was published just a decade after Glass' eventual death. The idea of sheer anger mobilizing a mutilated man back from a seemingly unsurvivable experience is a potent one, and stories of dogged, bottomless will have always directly touched the American psyche. But it's still a little hard not to chuckle a little at the shamelessness of the macho fantasy here, as Glass largely drops the Malickian exaltation and becomes a bloody, Mad Max-esque engine of savage vengeance.
Iñárritu compensates for the inherent silliness of the premise by making the film more about the sensory experience than the story. The first film shot with the Arri Alexa 65mm, The Revenant is a showpiece for the digital camera's flexibility in shooting immense panoramas and intimate close-ups in breathtaking detail. Iñárritu has emphasized the extreme difficulty of the shoot, because of the frigid temperatures in his remote Canadian and Argentinean locations. And as with his previous film, the regrettably shallow, self-congratulatory Best Picture winner Birdman, he relies heavily on ultra-long, complicated takes requiring a great deal of coordination and planning. The early Arikara battle sequence is particularly impressive; it isn't a single shot, but it keeps cuts to a minimum, with the camera rushing to follow one fleeing trapper, then the native who kills him, then the man who kills his killer, and so forth.
A brutally vast natural world that casually dwarfs its human inhabitants
It's a self-conscious, showy way of provoking emotional response, and the technical achievement is just as likely to distract from the story as it is to draw them in. But it's still mightily impressive. Iñárritu made the obvious choice of bringing in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who DP'd Alfonso Cuaron's Children Of Men and Gravity, as well as Malick's The New World and The Tree Of Life. Lubezki makes the most of the new camera, working with natural light for an icy clarity, and capturing both a stunning depth of field and some overwhelmingly beautiful natural phenomena. Rushing floodwater pours across a forest floor, powdery snow dusts the air. His panoramic pans, taking in the vastness of the surroundings again and again, may give 'pan-and-scan' a new, more positive meaning. The murderous cold of the Dakotas is evoked so vividly as to make audiences themselves flinch at the wind. The bear attack is just as effective: it's so visceral and graphic and shocking, that one aches sympathetically at each new blow or bite tearing Glass' body apart.
As with Pixar's recent release The Good Dinosaur, the American wilds (particularly the ferocious, tumbling river) are the real star of the movie. But the land wouldn't feel nearly as beautiful without the ugliness the cast brings to the conflict. The Revenant's focus on setting already makes it feel like a follow-up to Werner Herzog's classics Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath Of God. As in those two films, the theme is human audacity and human madness, and the setting is a brutally vast natural world that casually dwarfs its human inhabitants. In particular, a scene where Captain Henry and his men strap Glass' immobilized body to a travois and try to drag it up a steep, snow-slicked cliff recalls Fitzcarraldo in miniature.
But Hardy's performance takes The Revenant deep into Aguirre territory, making him a strong contender against Klaus Kinski's Aguirre in the Worst Person To Take On A Road Trip competition. Fitzgerald is written as a selfish, amoral bastard, but Hardy does an impressive job of making him human — an abhorrent human, but still a believable one. Hardy infuses him with enough lonely, belligerent conviction that he comes across not just as a self-justifying coward, but a true sociopath. Fitzgerald honestly believes whatever line he's spouting at any given moment, and his entitlement and utter lack of empathy make every scene he's in unstable. But Hardy's performance makes him mesmerizing.
By comparison, DiCaprio has much more physical work to do, in a much less complex role. Barely speaking for most of the movie — and often talking in a native language when he does — he mostly alternates grim determination with stark horror, stumbling through scene after scene with a fixed glower. Given DiCaprio's long hunt for an Oscar, the Best Actor buzz he already has for this film was inevitable. But The Revenant suggests he should get a special award for sheer endurance more than for a nuanced performance.
It's worth debating what exactly the point of The Revenant is
Iñárritu doesn't entirely overcome his longtime issues with The Revenant. Among his films like Birdman, Babel, and 21 Grams, this one comes furthest in escaping his tendency toward facile, shallow conclusions, delivered with vast self-importance. The dialogue can be naked and obvious — that flashback metaphor about the strength of the storm-tossed tree gets repeated at least two times too many. But relatively little time is wasted on talk, and when Iñárritu lets Lubezki's images and Ryuichi Sakamoto's eerie score speak for him, any sense of pontificating falls away in the gravity of the world they capture. Still, it's worth debating what exactly the point of The Revenant is. Stripped of all its considerable craft, it's yet another basic betrayal-and-revenge story, the kind that's mostly satisfying because it indulges a fantasy. Malick's visually similar films always seem to reach for enlightenment and the ineffable; Herzog is obsessed with the infinite possibilities of human ambition. It's unclear whether Iñárritu has any broader philosophical agenda worthy of the craft he showcases here.
But while the style may outpace the substance, that doesn't make the style any less magnificent. And when it comes to sheer customer satisfaction, The Revenant checks nearly every box, up to and including the man vs. wild throwdown. It just makes a jarring, memorable statement about how often the wild is likely to win that uneven fight.
More from The Verge
It’s man versus bear. And bear wins. Or does it? Early reports of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s intestine-straighteningly brutal and beautiful new western thriller The Revenant have understandably focused on one quite extraordinary scene. Nineteenth-century fur trapper and frontiersman Hugh Glass, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, encounters some bear cubs in an eerily quiet forest and then hears the snuffly-wet sound of their parent behind him, a grownup grizzly who has gained a broadly correct impression of Glass’s overall intentions. The ensuing scene is one of horrifyingly primal violence, a brilliantly conceived CGI-reality cluster, during which I clenched into a whimperingly foetal ball so tight that afterwards I practically had to be rolled out of the cinema auditorium.
The Revenant: first reactions to DiCaprio thriller suggest Oscar potential
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The immersion and immediacy of that confrontation reminded me of the moment in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World when moviegoers go to the sensory-enhanced “feelies” and watch a sex scene on a bearskin rug. They feel every bear hair. So could I, and I also felt every droplet of bear spittle, every serration of tooth, and I understood what it feels like when parts of your ribcage are exposed to fresh air and light rain.
Some have described it as a rape scene. It isn’t. But it’s about power, fear and rage, and this moment, quite as much as the human duplicity that follows, is the driving force for this film’s theme, commoner in the movies than real life: revenge, revenge against men and maybe a kind of revenge against nature. Screenwriter Mark L Smith has worked partly from the 2002 novel by Michael Punke, and partly from the real-life story that itself inspired the book: the adventures of Hugh Glass, a Wyoming mountain man who survived a bear-mauling and went on an incredible odyssey to track down the two men who abandoned him to die. This story fictionalises and intensifies his personal circumstances and payback motivation.
Glass has joined other civilian privateers engaged in a US military expedition led by Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) along the Missouri river to establish a lucrative fur-trapping base. Glass and the others are set upon by tribesmen-warriors in an electrifying and terrifying sequence, in which warning cries are silenced by the sibilant arrival of an arrow in the throat. Glass, an experienced tracker, guides the terrified survivors’ retreat across country, where he is mauled by the bear, and two men are detailed and promised extra pay to look after him: young Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) and John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy with pop-eyed, truculent malevolence. Once left alone with their charge, they leave Glass to die in agony and figure on returning to base to pick up their extra pay with a fine tale about giving him a Christian burial. But they reckon without Glass’s fanatical will to survive.
Generally, immersive movies enclose, they put you inside, they dunk you down into what it is supposed to feel like. Iñárritu and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki do the opposite: they expose you to the elements. You are out in a piercingly painful cold, under an endless, pitiless sky. This is not an immersion that feels like a sensual surrender; it’s closer to having your skin peeled. The images that the movie conjures are ones of staggering, crystalline beauty: gasp-inducing landscapes and beautifully wrought closeups, such as the leaves in bulbous freezing mounds, and a tiny crescent moon, all unsentimentally rendered. But there is also something hallucinatory and unwholesome about these images, as if hunger and pain has brought Glass to the secularised state of a medieval saint tormented with visions. Poignantly, he mimes shooting distant moose with a tree branch instead of a rifle, and when he suddenly comes across a vast plain full of bison, it’s unclear for a second if he is imagining things. A ruined church looks like a miraculous example of cave painting.
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The Revenant recalls Ford’s The Searchers and modifies its themes of tribal and sexual transgression and its cruel invocation of scalping; the warriors who attack at first are enraged at the kidnap of a Native American woman, Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk’o). At other times, Iñárritu appears to be inspired by Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, with the visions of imperial greed and the vast river in full flood – or maybe his documentary Grizzly Man, in which the grim-faced Herzog famously listened on his headphones to the sound of someone being mauled to death. There is arguably something of Altman in the wintry frontier terrain and certainly a Malickian weightlessness in some of Glass’s dreams of his wife. But what is so distinctive about this Iñárritu picture is its unitary control and its fluency: no matter how extended, the film’s tense story is under the director’s complete control and he unspools great meandering, bravura travelling shots to tell it: not dissimilar, in some ways, to his previous picture, Birdman. The movie is as thrilling and painful as a sheet of ice held to the skin.
•The Revenant is released in the US on 25 December, in Australia on 7 January and in the UK on 15 January
Alejandro González Iñárritu won the Academy Award for Best Director last year for Birdman, a film that also won the Oscar for Best Picture. The movie was almost universally acclaimed by film critics, and was loved by most audiences around the world. How does a filmmaker follow that kind of success, and how do they prove to themselves that their best accomplishments might still lie somewhere ahead? The answer in this case is simple: by making the most challenging picture yet of his career, with the most challenging material at hand, and do it in a way that allows understatement to become a transcendent chorus of expressiveness. The Revenant is one of the greatest films of 2015, a timeless epic of the human will to both overcome and surrender, and to be a force for nature's own will.The Revenant had a long road to the big screen, and the production suffered some setbacks as well as an ever-inflated budget. But every penny is there on the screen, and it was money well spent. Can the film make back the investment? I think it can, since it has several factors working in its favor.
First of all, Leonardo DiCaprio is a global movie star, and he has a reliable fanbase who tend to show up. Nobody should underestimate his ability to open a movie and help it get legs under it. Second, the film follows Birdman's remarkable success and should benefit from that association. Third, despite a few other award groups failing to offer the film the degree of recognition it deserves, I am confident the Oscars will not make that mistake, and so The Revenant will enjoy its own awards buzz on top of the Birdman linkage -- the Golden Globes attention will definitely help in that regard, too.
Fourth, it's the sort of movie with action and historic weight and the 'based on a true story' angle that combine to help it appear an Oscar contender that's also exciting, scary, and entertaining beyond the dramatic value it carries. Fifth, the limited release for Christmas helps it garner attention before it opens wide in January after giving Star Wars: The Force Awakens some initial breathing room. This means it can play as counter-programming but also as dessert for audiences excited by Star Wars and looking for something else to continue their 'movie high.'
Expect strong per screen numbers during the limited release. In wide release, we'll have to see how big Star Wars holds, and whether The Revenant can attract enough buzz to convince audiences to spring for another theater outing soon after the New Year.
Is The Revenant deserving of box office success and the attention it's likely to get? Oh, most definitely. Read on for my detailed look at this magnificent picture and what makes it one of the year's best films..
I see many reviews claiming the film lacks depth, or is devoid of emotional impact and characterization. Even positive reviews frequently claim it is an exercise in action, a simple revenge tale, and a straightforward wilderness survival story. While it can certainly be narrowly enjoyed as a western mashup of 'man vs nature' and 'dead man's vengeance' films, it is far more than that.
It's not as if I'm incapable of criticizing González Iñárritu's films. Last year, I was among the handful of critics who gave Birdman a negative review -- as you can see if you read it here, mine was pretty unforgiving -- and I've had mixed reactions to his other films (I loved Amores Perros and liked Babel; I disliked 21 Grams and strongly disliked Biutiful). So my perception of The Revenant isn't clouded by any preconceived notions about the filmmaker.
Nor did I walk into The Revenant determined to love it. Having been so severely disappointed with Birdman, I was on guard against letting my hopes get ahead of me. The trailers looked promising, but I was well aware such a tale offered ample opportunity for González Iñárritu to fall into any number of narrative traps or technical excesses.
But he didn't, and instead delivered the finest film of his career to date. Visually, narratively, emotionally, it's the most artistically whole and impactful of his work. Instead of overcomplicating with attempts to draw attention to the filmmaking itself, the film embraces a love of the beauty around it and is often content to let us exist in the natural moment -- a choice that speaks directly to the narrative arc, which I'll get to shortly. Suffice to say for now, the ability to perceive our place within the natural world and accept such moments, to allow them to guide us and define us, in turn defines the filmmaking at every level just as it is reflected in the story.
I cannot fathom that another film will win the Oscar for Best Cinematography. Nothing else this year really comes close to Emmanuel Lubezki's work on The Revenant. It evokes the visual impression of some of Terrence Malick's films, on two of which -- The New World and Tree of Life (the best film of 2011) -- Lubezki was cinematographer. Every frame is a work of art here, and it is a testament to Lubezki's and González Iñárritu's nuanced understanding of natural light and natural space that they crafted these images so deeply invested with the influence of natural phenomena on the photographic process. Even the sound is to be marveled at, if you care to notice the difference between the puffy crunch of compacted snow beneath a boot as opposed to powdery snow or sharp crackling ice. There is little dialogue, so sound editing became extremely important to the film's impression, and like everything else in the film, the result is remarkable.
The film often felt like Malick's presence was somewhere guiding the production, not only in photography but also in pacing, in the use of some sorts of 'visions' by certain characters, and in larger themes about the spirit and the natural world around us. In the end, it is far more structured than Malick's work, but the impression is there in the best way. I suspect this is less about a direct intentional influence taken from his work, and more about the fact The Revenant speaks to similar themes demanding similar ways of thinking to approach them in cinema. Observing the purely physical and natural, perceiving it in a way transcending one's self, and experiencing something metaphysical -- that is at heart a very Malick-esque thematic foundation, after all.
The Reverant is a remarkable film, raw and visceral and spiritual in a way too few films understand how to be in such a simultaneous manner. That it is underappreciated and/or misunderstood even by many of its admirers -- for some of the positive reviews still assert it lacks deeper characterization and emotional resonance -- is probably at least partially due to the complexity of its expression of overlapping concern with both the physical and the spiritual. It doesn't assert itself in easy, typical cinematic parlance, relying far more on compounding power of visual implication. The more we watch, the more we see, and the more we see, the more we understand.
As for characterization, there is a great deal happening below the surface of the lives in this story. I will begin not with Leonardo DiCaprio's protagonist, but with Tom Hardy's antagonist, as a way of coming round about to the central conflict and emotional tension driving that conflict. And here I must add a spoiler warning, because it's impossible to delve into the depths of this story and talk about the meaning and emotional weight without discussing some important aspects of the story. So be warned, there are a few significant spoilers ahead, but if you've read synopses of the film you may know many or most of them already.
Hardy's character isn't evil, nor simple in his emotional sentiments or motivations. He swears to stay with the seemingly mortally wounded DiCaprio and give him a decent burial, and then proceeds to plan on doing just that. He digs a grave, he waits for days, and he tries to explain his concerns to DiCaprio while asking him to give a sign that he wants to be put out of his misery. When he acts, he does so legitimately thinking he received the go-ahead. And then DiCaprio's son sees this and begins shouting, threatening with a gun, but Hardy tries repeatedly to explain himself before panicking that the boy's screams will attract the attention of the Indians hunting them through the mountains. He stabs the boy, and within seconds seems overcome by the realization of what he's done.
We must remember that Hardy's character frequently postures, but is frequently revealed to be disguising a constant undercurrent of fear. He was once scalped by Indians, and when he speaks of it, we see that the scars run far deeper than the skin. He is deathly afraid of ever being captured and scalped again, the horror of it seemingly worse even than death in his mind. So he wants to flee the Indians, wants to avoid being caught, and later his fear of the vengeance of the Indians transforms into fear of DiCaprio's vengeance coming to haunt him.
Hardy's is a masterful supporting performance, as a man with nothing in the world and determined to find at least some measure of comfort some day even if it's just a small piece of land to relax on, so he can stop struggling just to remain alive and with half of his scalp left on his head. He's not very smart, not very careful, and not very brave.
It's easy to hate him for his sins, but equally easy to feel a bit sorry for him since in some ways you can relate to his point -- DiCaprio appears to have no chance of survival, carrying him through the wilderness is slowing the rest of the team and likely will result in them being caught and killed by the pursuing Indians. DiCaprio is in agony, unable even to speak except in choked cries of pain through gritted teeth. To Hardy, keeping DiCaprio alive is only torturing the man and condemning the rest of them. He is cruel and selfish, yes; but so too are most of those around him, in a pitiless, frozen world where death stalks the just and unjust equally. At all costs, he wants to get away and back to safety, and then to get paid enough money so he never has to endure that pitiless world again.
Which brings us to the main performance of the film, and the counterpoint to Hardy's emotional weakness. DiCaprio's isn't a performance without greater meaning, it merely refuses to lay out the details in an easy fashion for viewers. He is a man who left behind the 'civilized' white world, preferring to join the Pawnee where he married a wife and had a son. When confronted by U.S. Calvary, DiCaprio struck back by killing an officer to save his own wife. The Pawnee were subsequently killed, their homes burned, DiCaprio's wife murdered and his son severely burned. There was a Christian church burned to the ground in the flames that consumed the Pawnee village, where DiCaprio sought solace after losing the new life he'd made with the Pawnee -- a man between two worlds, having lost both, and now left to try to coexist with the remains of his favored people now colonized by his former people. We never find out the details of what started the conflict between the U.S. Calvary and the Pawnee, with whom the whites coexisted in an 'occupying' fashion.
In the aftermath of that general but vaguely sketched background, DiCaprio's character tried to keep his son safe and alive, teaching him to avoid attracting attention and to work alongside the whites while avoiding stepping too far into their world. As a father, his sole purpose became helping his son adapt and grow to manhood with a foot in both worlds -- his Pawnee heritage, and the white world consuming the land. DiCaprio feared what white men could and often would do, and he saw that fear realized when Hardy murdered the boy.
The Revenant Review Nyt
In the aftermath, DiCaprio's struggle for survival is first a comparison and contrast with Hardy's own fearful attempts to stay safe and alive. But whereas Hardy flees toward some new life, DiCaprio has no life left. Hardy killed to stay alive, DiCaprio stays alive so he can kill. DiCaprio becomes the manifestation of Hardy's fears, and a literal manifestation of his own conflicted soul. Hardy represents everything about the white world that took DiCaprio's life away -- the bigotry toward the Pawnee that led to the slaughter of the village and the death of DiCaprio's wife, and the subsequent loss of his son. DiCaprio no longer wants to successfully and carefully navigate the white world, he walks through it as a ghost, with only vengeance as a release for all of the pain and sorrow crushing his heart.
DiCaprio's family were all killed, he himself was buried and left for dead. His return from death is at odds with his recurring vision of his wife peaceful and at rest, unburdened by hate or pain or vengeance. After his son's death, the boy enters DiCaprio's visions as well, in the burned church that represented the overlap of the white and Indian worlds in the village. And when DiCaprio seeks to embrace the boy for solace, there is none to be had because DiCaprio's mission is one of death and destruction, no different than the fate delivered by the other white men upon Pawnee victims.
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The film isn't equating one killing with another. Rather, the point is about the survivors, not the killers or the victims. Honoring his loved ones is not possible through hatred and death, the very instruments of their demise; it is only possible when he lets go and embraces his own fate and the fate of everyone else as determined by larger forces.
What larger forces? The natural world, of course. The world that sent a bear to maul DiCaprio and sent a blizzard to torment those in the mountains and forests. The world that provided the river for escape and provided the animals for food. We see nature as a force not unlike God in the story, always enforcing its will upon every character and every sequence. There are constant reminders of the majesty of this world, and of its unequaled power. We are dwarfed by it, physically and metaphysically. That is what DiCaprio must learn, and it's a lesson he hasn't been able to hear because of his singular obsession with revenge, despite the fact he is surrounded constantly by evidence of the fact of the natural world's awesome power and his own destiny inevitably determined by those forces.
It is important that he finally hears it only when Hardy of all people makes him see the truth. Nothing DiCaprio does can bring his son back. Nothing. And in that terrible truth, he can comprehend how truly powerless he is, and how blind he's been all along. His visions of his wife tried to tell him, even as he was engulfed in nothing but a world larger than himself exerting its will upon him, as he struggled first against and then alongside it. The final struggle he had to give up was his struggle to control life and death. He heard the words several times before, but now he speaks them with understanding, and acts accordingly.
The Revanent is among the truly great films of 2015, and is Alejandro González Iñárritu's greatest film, with Oscar-worthy performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. You feel every moment, so by the end you share in the characters' exhaustion of heart and soul, and perhaps in their glimpse at something infinite, beautiful, and terrifying.
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