It is a battle he barely survives but, with limited medical resources, he is merely a drain on their speed. With supplies low and half their party dead, tensions begin to mount as the remaining men make a bee-line back to their outpost.ĭays pass and Glass comes face-to-face with a protective grizzly bear. And, speaking as a former AP teacher of American Literature, his latest journey is an epic combination of some very real American themes.īased on the experiences of frontiersman and fur trapper Hugh Glass (played here by a very engaging Leonardo DiCaprio), The Revenant takes viewers on a tense tale of survival and revenge in the harshest of conditions as a group of hunters and trappers find themselves at odds with the natural world after an ambush by the Native American Arikara Indians. Alongside the incredible cinematography of Emmanuel Lubezki (of Gravity and Birdman fame), he couldn’t be in better (or more inspired) company to completely re-charge the genre of Naturalism and regional writing.
Iñárritu is a mad genius at the helm of this western. This is tough film to sit through only because the events it depicts are so incredibly realistic and unflinching.
If last year’s Oscar-winning Birdman was the director’s ode to the literary genre of magic realism, then The Revenant is his solid championing of the heart and soul of American Literature. Director Alejandro González Iñárritu returns to cinemas this year with a harrowing journey into the bruised and bloodied heart of the relatively undiscovered landscape of the American territories in the early 1820s.