Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Pride and Prejudice And Zombies": Just Skin And Bones

Directed and Written
by Burr Steers

(R - Lionsgate - 1 hr, 48 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

Let me tell y'all a little something about how I do what I do. If you've ever wondered how I or other critics are able to get out big comprehensive reviews before the movie comes out (or at least that's always the plan), that's because the studios usually hold special invite only screenings for critics a few days before wide release. It's a mutually beneficial process, we need the time to put together our columns and shows in time for release day, and the studios want those reviews running on release day for publicity. This process, called "press screening", happens in most cities of sufficient size, and in Dallas a lot of them happen at the Angelika Film Center at Mockingbird Station. Now, the studios want a full house to get as many people's reaction to the movie as possible, so these screenings are often intentionally overbooked, which means you have to get there early to get a seat, especially at the Angelika because it's a nice theater but not an especially big one. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is the only screening for a big studio release I've been to where they failed to get a full house. They couldn't get people to see it even when they were giving it away for free.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a great period piece in that it perfectly captures that one moment about a decade ago when we all suddenly couldn't get enough of zombies, when fanfiction and mashup culture were still mysterious new things as far as most people were concerned, and thus this kind of post-post-post-modern meta "ironic" genre fusion was still considered a novel concept. It's based off of a book of the same name that literally came about after the author drew a monster and a public domain novel out of a hat. It's not like I don't get the appeal of this kind of deadpan humor, take Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter as an example. At first, the joke is "Heh. President Lincoln didn't actually fight vampires.", but then you watch it and the joke becomes "Huh. President Lincoln didn't actually fight vampires, but this is presented as a semi-serious work of historical fiction as though he had.". The joke is that the joke doesn't know that it's a joke, and it can work really well in literature, where you can suggest the image of absurd things like Mr. Darcy using carrion flies to detect the undead or Abraham Lincoln breaking down the door of a slave owning vampire family and personally beheading them with a silver axe, and the reader can imagine the details however they want.

The problem with adapting that is, film can't rely on suggestion. By its very nature, film is built on depiction, which means that the dissonance is harder to hide or make light of unless you go for pure comedy, and successful versions of this dance do. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, another film that feels like a 2000s nostalgia throwback released a decade early, pulls that off. But Pride and Prejudice and Zombies takes itself just seriously enough that you can't think of it as a mindless popcorn flick but are just stylized enough that you can't take it too seriously. The result is a film that has no idea who it's trying to appeal to and thus ends up being a semi-serious adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that keeps interrupting itself with an ongoing period zombie outbreak in the English countryside.

Sure, that's essentially what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies the book was, but like I said before, in a book it's easier to do this kind of genre fusion mashup stuff because in a book suspension of disbelief is easier to maintain. In a movie the tonal whiplash just feels awkward unless it's super stylized, but this isn't. It feels like they wanted to make a Matthew Vaughn film (think Kingsman or Kick-Ass), but Matthew Vaughn... is a better technical director, for starters - but he also knows how to blend sincere starry eyed enthusiasm with cartoon hard-R ultra violence and make it look like it's easy to do. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fails at both, it's like a bored fourteen year old in English class doodling amateur graphic novels in the margins of their notebook, they clearly worked very hard on it, but it takes itself too seriously to be genuinely fun, and trying to hold back the violence to avoid having any trouble for what they've drawn was the wrong creative decision. Especially when there really isn't anything else for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to prop itself up on. The cast ranges from forgettable to terrible, and it rarely embraces the kind of absurdity inherent to its own premise. Normally this would be the kind of thing I'd tear into, but there's so little meat on the bones that doing so is like trying to tackle a cloud of smoke.

For any reason someone might want to see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies there is something I can recommend instead. If you want a mid-2000s zombie throwback, just rent Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. If you want a hyper stylized period horror film, rent Crimson Peak in a few weeks, or see The Revenant if you're more in the mood for an art film. If you want Pride and Prejudice... then just read Pride and Prejudice, why did you even consider this? In short, it's not worth your time, and it's definitely not worth mine.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The 5th Wave": Just Another Drop In The Storm

Directed by J. Blakeson
Written by Akiva Goldsman, Susannah Grant,
and Jeff Pinker

(PG-13 - Sony - 1 hr, 52 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

The jokes come too easily. It should have pleaded the Fifth instead of diluting the value of the First. It tries and fails to be the Fifth Coming of Katniss Everdeen. Everyone onstage was possessed by body snatchers themselves just before the director shouted action. The entire genre lazily follows the trends set by The Hunger Games and thus undermines its own point. They're all so terrible for mostly the same reasons that it's hard not to start grading these movies on a curve like some sort of market niche based affirmative action.

I get that I'm not the audience for these movies, I had no patience for lazy power fantasies aimed at insecure teenagers when I was one, and I certainly don't now. Hell, if it weren't for my little sister still being really into the genre, I probably wouldn't have bothered going to the advance screening for this, I'd have saved it for bad movie night with friends. I try not to hate a film based solely on genre, they all have their own scales ranging from terrible to transcendent, and there are some diamonds in the rough that is the nebulously defined genre of "young adult fiction".

The Hunger Games itself is no masterpiece, but it at least tries to tell an engaging story with fleshed out characters and a compelling point, and the backlog of John Green remains the best contemporary example of the form - but comparing that to Divergent or The Maze Runner is like comparing homemade pecan crusted tilapia to a Big Mac, they're both food, but one clearly had more thought put into it, and it's at least partially a matter of personal taste.

The 5th Wave is okay as these things go.... which is to say that it's slightly above the first Divergent but can't reach the mediocrity of Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials. It has a couple of interesting ideas to play around with, but the director and the assembled cast aren't ambitious enough to do anything with them, and as a result they have created arguably the most pandering YA film to date; The 5th Wave is literally the story of an average high school student turned regime toppling one-woman army. To wit; Chloe Grace Moretz is Cassie, an average teenager in Ohio who is witness to the arrival of the Others, which is said with such reverent tones that you can practically hear the unnecessary capital letter. For ten days they hover over the world's major cities, waiting, then they start launching several distinct Waves of attacks.

The First Wave is an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out the world's electricity (which is a genuinely gripping moment up until Cassie's internal monolouge breaks the atmosphere by spelling it out), the Second Wave is an earthquake and resulting tsunamis that destroys the world's coastlines ("in Ohio, we only have to worry about the lake, I can't imagine how bad the coasts are", Cassie's monologue gravely intones, and immediately afterwards we are shown the destruction of Boston, London and Bangkok, the show don't tell here is all over the place). The Third Wave is a plague of modified avian flu that wipes out most of the survivors, including Cassie's mother, which means that she, her father, and her kid brother Sam head to a refugee camp, where a US Army officer informs them that the Fourth Wave consists of the Others taking human form and hunting down stragglers one by one. After a confrontation with the adults results in a firefight that kills Cassie's father, the Army takes the children including Sammie to an Air Force base leading Cassie to suspect that they may not be what they seem (no prize for guessing what The Twist is), so she grabs an assault rifle and sets off in search of her brother.

So it's Invasion of the Body Snatchers mixed with Independence Day by way of an extended Twilight Zone episode. Alright, I'm down with that, there are worse starting points for a budget sci-fi movie, and there are moments when The 5th Wave sort of works. The first twenty minutes, as the Waves arrive in the fashion of Biblical plagues, would be something truly gripping if Cassie's interior monologue didn't keep interrupting them by explaining to the audience what it just saw. This is another one of those movies where if the first act was released on its own as a short film, it'd be something great. And I can respect it for almost having a point beyond "You are special because you don't fit in" with a central conceit of a world where people are unable to trust each other after a devastating attack from out of the blue leads everyone to believe that the attackers are hiding among them and could strike again at any moment.

My god, using the uneasy framework of a YA dystopia as a broad allusion to post-9/11 terrorism fears? Yes! I can totally get behind that. Sure, it's not particularly inspired as far as a Body Snatchers update goes, but when you're aiming for the same audience as Divergent this may as well be 1984! Unfortunately, the rest of the script is so uninspired and the cast so ill equipped to convey the gravity of the situation that that little nugget of brilliance makes The 5th Wave even more insulting by reminding us of what it could have been.

And that cast really is terrible; I don't know whether to call Chloe Grace Moretz a bad actress, it's probably too soon to tell just yet, and I actually kind of liked that other YA movie she did (I think it was called If I Stay), but, she's really bad in this, showing a complete inability to capture the gravity of the literal end of the world. TV actor Alex Roe shows up as one of the aliens that has decided to rebel against his upbringing by saving Cassie's life and helping her find her brother, and it's supposed to be a twist, but pretty much everyone in the audience could immediately tell that he's an alien because of how forcefully wooden his performance is. Everyone else is similarly out of their league, ranging from forgettable to mildly amusing; my little sister has class with kids that could give a better performance than the American Eagle models onstage, and she's a high school sophomore.

So it doesn't do much with its premise, and the cast kind of sucks, but maybe it at least works as a dumb action movie, right? Nope. It's surprisingly self-serious for such films, so it barely allows the action to happen, and when it does it's consistently under lit and badly choreographed, at one point the kids at the Air Force base are sent to do battle with survivors in the ruins of a non description city, and it looks like it's a recording of a Call of Duty multiplayer digital paintball match, I'm still not sure whether that's intentional or if it's the result of having no real effects budget.

Occasional flashes of inspiration keep The 5th Wave from being completely pointless, but they can't keep it from falling into the same pointless malaise of other YA films. Maybe in about seven years or so, if YA can grow up with its audience the way that Harry Potter did, maybe then we'll get something worthwhile out of it, but for now this is another one to skip.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 2/5

Let's Talk About Movies: Why Has "Bay-ghazi" Gone Bust?

Alo Party Peoples.

I haven't seen Michael Bay's Benghazi movie, and unless I have to for some reason I don't plan on seeing Michael Bay's Benghazi movie. I took one look at the phrase "Michael Bay's Benghazi movie" and immediately thought "Was a Call of Duty movie deemed too risky?". Everyone was expecting it to be "American Sniper: Election Year Edition", and my only real question about it was who would be more obnoxious about its existence; angry irrational Trump boosting family on Facebook or angry irrational Sanders boosting friends on Twitter.

But now it looks like the question is if anyone will talk about it at all. Michael Bay's 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is a massive flop. Critics savaged it, and audiences have largely stayed away. This is the first time in Bay's career that he's had an unqualified failure on his hands, one that looks doubly bad after American Sniper was aimed at the same audience at the same time last year and became the highest grossing film of 2014. Again, I haven't seen the movie, but that doesn't mean I can't weigh in on why 13 Hours is tanking so hard. If you ask me, it comes down to pre-release buildup and perception of the subject matter.

American Sniper had time to build up hype on the twin conservative media juggernauts of talk radio and Fox News during it's Oscar Season qualifying run - and for good measure it was about a subject that they had already thought of as an impossibly noble hero; Chris Kyle had been posthumously cast as an unambiguous good guy in the increasingly murky War on Terror. Not only that, but coming out in time for that Oscar qualifying run meant that the Academy could fulfill its obligation to nominate anything Clint Eastwood is attached to before he dies and put it up for 6 Oscars including Best Picture, meaning that it had even more steam behind it. Combine that with the residual high of sweeping Republican victories in midterm elections a few months before and you have a perfect pep rally for the right wing.

13 Hours, on the other hand, failed to come out in time for consideration by the Academy, and it wasn't heavily screened for critics, meaning that it had nowhere near as much time to build up momentum. Even if it had qualified for the Oscars, Michael Bay simply does not have anywhere near as much clout within Hollywood as Clint Eastwood does. If anything they tried to top American Sniper; there was a big publicized world premiere at AT&T Stadium in Dallas with Bay himself and two of the survivors of Benghazi present, Donald Trump rented out a theater in Iowa to show the movie to supporters, but it just couldn't reach critical mass. American Sniper's ascendancy was lightning in a bottle, it came out at just the right time under just the right circumstances to be a hit, and those circumstances are nearly impossible to recreate.

Especially without the distance neccesary to make a story out of its subject matter. People have compared 13 Hours to Bay's Pearl Harbor, the last time he tried for an Oscar by making a CGI spectacular action film out of a real-life tragedy, but Pearl Harbor at least came out decades after the events it depicts, there was time to grieve. But with 13 Hours, the survivors of Benghazi are still here and still telling their story, and Libya is still a war torn mess to this day. This is like making a disaster movie about 9/11 in 2003; it simply isn't viable because of how insultingly tone deaf it is.

That, at the bottom of it all, is why American Sniper was a massive hit, and why 13 Hours is a flop. Chris Kyle's story happened long enough ago that it's "okay" to make a sweeping generalization of it, while Benghazi is still too recent and too real for too many. As I understand it, the right wing's image of Chris Kyle is "common man becomes a hero after being caught up in the sweep of history", but their image of Benghazi is "incompetent bureaucratic clusterf***" and/or "deliberate sabotage and cover-up in service of the Obama-Clinton Doctrine". Which of those sounds like a more compelling narrative around which to build an event movie that people will want to see?

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "Anomalisa": A Melancholic Meandering Masterpiece

Directed by Duke Johnson
and Charlie Kaufman
Written by Charlie Kaufman

(R - Paramount - 1 hr, 30 mins) 

SPOILER WARNING

Alo Party Peoples.

Animation is film making unrestrained by reality. It is the magic of moving pictures in its purest possible form. It is every outlandish or offbeat idea that you can imagine perfectly realized onscreen, offering the artist complete creative control. Which is why it's so popular with the art house set, the best way to make an indie brat even more pretentious is to remove the need to interact with other humans, and the complete creative control animations offers means that to a certain stripe of critic - say, the kind that attend the film festivals where Anomalisa has been building up hype and acclaim for months - the medium automatically makes what's being depicted seem more meaningful regardless of whether it actually is. Fortunately, Charlie Kaufman is no mere indie brat, and Anomalisa is the real deal.

It's 2005, and David Thewlis is the voice of Michael Stone, author of "How May I Help You Help Them?", a very successful self-help guide for sales representatives, and working in that field for years has made him emotionally distant from everyone around him, to the point that literally everyone else looks and sounds like Tom Noonan. He's speaking about his book at a convention at a hotel in Cincinnati, where he runs into his old flame at the bar, and promptly kills any chance of hooking back up. As he storms off back to his suite, he hears something amazing, Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa, an insecure young woman and the only person in the world that looks different to Michael. She's an anomaly in his life, hence the title, and thus he must use his one night in Cincinnati to court her.

Anomalisa is a film about detachment, and every detail of the production is built around that theme; the painstakingly detailed environments are realistically drab and banal, the characters constantly teeter on the edge of the uncanny valley, it sets itself in a Middle American city that has virtually no identity as far as cinema is concerned, the "camera" takes long, slow tracking shots through the hotel's washed out red and beige interiors, it's all meant to get us into the same melancholic meandering mindset as Michael. For a while you wonder why this story is being told in animation to begin with, that it would have been a lot easier and a lot cheaper to shoot real actors in a real hotel, but eventually you forget that, and Anomalisa reveals itself to be such an intimate, low-key thing, that shooting it with real actors with recognizable faces would take away from its universality.

But the cast they do have is terrific, David Thewlis infuses Michael with real vulnerability and inner life as someone that's bored with the banality of their existence but can't quite conceive of anything else, Tom Noonan as nearly everyone is believably average, and if the Academy took voice acting seriously as a discipline I garuntee you Jennifer Jason Leigh would be nominated for her performance here over The Hateful Eight. At first Lisa and her relationship with Michael look like the most insufferable version of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl imaginable, to the point that she is literally the only person in the world that registers as different to him. But then, as their night together wears on, Michael starts to get a little more demanding. Telling Lisa to keep talking because he can't be without the sound of her voice, getting her to give him her life story, eventually convincing her to have sex with him, exploiting her own vulnerabilities to his advantage.

This is not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, this is a somber deconstruction of one. Not one that's angry about it that violently tears it apart, but one that simply lets the trope play out as it understands it in such a way that it tells the audience "Look at this. Isn't it pathetic?" The morning after Michael and Lisa have their affair, when they're eating breakfast a few hours before Michael has to give his speech, they're discussing maybe running off with each other, but just as Michael is getting Lisa onboard, tinges of Tom Noonan's voice infringe on Lisa's, soon they sound one and the same. Michael has tired of the fantasy, and he's so horrified by this that when he finally goes onstage, he has a mental breakdown and totally bombs it.

Anomalisa is very avant garde, incredibly strange, and not for the faint of heart, but if you consider yourself a lover of animation, or even just a lover of film, you owe yourself a viewing. This is a masterpiece, and that is not a term I use lightly.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 5/5

88th Academy Award Nominations (Films of 2015)

Alo Party Peoples.

To cinephiles, the Oscars are simultaneously the most and least important awards ceremony on the planet. Nobody takes them seriously as a measure of artistic merit, but they still lend legitimacy, and sometimes a box-office boost, to the nominees. As an example from last year, without seven Academy Award nominations, nobody would go to see a biography of Alan Turing.

This year's awards, at least on the surface, are a marked improvement over last year's. There's a lot more diversity as far as genre is concerned. Just looking at Picture, sure we've got the requisite period dramas; Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, The Revenant, it's debatable whether Spotlight and The Big Short count considering that they're both stories from this century. But then you have stuff like The Martian and-holy s***! Fury Road is a Best Picture nominee! Sure, there's no universe where it wins, but it's still amazing that it got nominated. Best Picture has been a two horse race for a long time, and this year is no different. The big contenders are Spotlight and The Revenant, but if you want to bet on an underdog I'd go with The Big Short, just don't blame me if you lose any money on it

Beast Director is a bit of a different game, I expect that they'll use it to "split" a Best Picture tie by giving it to the losing film's director. On one hand, I'd really rather not see Innaritu's ego get even bigger if he wins for The Revenant, but I expect him to win unless Spotlight turns out to be a surprise juggernaut. For my two cents, it's still amazing that George Miller was nominated for Fury Road, in a just competition he would win, but there's no universe where that happens.

The acting awards are a good place to address the elephant in the room, despite the big public controversy over it last year, once again every acting nominee is white. And this year there were in fact high profile minority performances, O'Shea Jackson Jr. in Straight Outta Compton, Michael B. Jordan in Creed, Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation, but most of them didn't have proper Oscar campaigns lined up, so they were mostly overlooked, and the only nomination Creed got was for the old white guy.

On one hand, it really sucks for this to happen again, on the other, if you can overlook that there are some good nominees in here. Leonardo DiCaprio for The Revenant, Matt Damon for The Martian, Christian Bale for The Big Short, Kate Winslet for Steve Jobs, there's nobody here that I'd say needs to be kicked out so someone else can get in. Well, maybe Alicia Vikander for The Danish Girl, but only so Alicia Vikander can be nominated for her career redefining turn in Ex Machina.

In general, it'll be easy to call the winners here; Leonardo DiCaprio is going to win Best Actor for The Revenant, he's been nominated and lost so many times, he's earned it, but I can maybe see Eddie Redmayne giving him a run for his money with The Danish Girl Jennifer Lawrence is going to win Best Actress for Joy, and she'll be the least enthusiastic Oscar winner ever. Sylvester Stallone is going to win Best Supporting Actor for Creed, because the Academy always loves rewarding its own. Best Supporting Actress is the only one that it'll be difficult to call, except that Jennifer Jason-Leigh is not going to win for The Hateful Eight, Tarantino films are too intense for the Academy's delicate sensibilities.

The two screenplay awards are about as binary as Picture and Director. Original will likely be a tie between Bridge of Spies and Spotlight, it depends on which period drama they like more, maybe it goes to Straight Outta Compton so they can offset any outrage over the milquetoast acting nominees. Adapted Screenplay likely goes to The Big Short because it's still a serious period piece message movie, but it's got enough energy and bite for the Academy to feel edgy and relevant by handing it the prize, although it they really wanted to do that they could give Original Screenplay to Ex Machina or Inside Out, because they deserve it.

As for the technical awards, they'll be easy to call. The Revenant takes Cinematography, it's too self important and momentarily dazzling not to. It's bulls*** for Crimson Peak to be shut out of Costume Design, Makeup, and Production Design, The Revenant's likely to be a juggernaut here too. Inside Out might as well get Best Animated Feature now, they don't call it the Pixar Award for nothing. The Force Awakens almost definitely walks away with Effects, for a Star Wars film that's practically a birthright. Best Original Score is a bit frustrating for me, The Hateful Eight deserves it for Morricone's loving pastiche of his own iconic Western scores, I can see him winning pretty easily, but it would have been nice to see some love for Ex Machina and Steve Jobs' tasteful use of ambient synthesizers, or Fury Road's blast in the face of percussive rock. Maybe it's a generational thing, but it still would have been nice to see

You can find the list of nominees for the 88th Academy Awards on the Academy's website, the awards air February 28th on ABC, I'll see you there.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Revenant": An Art House Movie For The Rest Of Us

Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Written by Alejandro González Iñárritu
and Mark Smith

(R - 20th Century Fox - 2 hrs, 36 mins) 

Alo Party Peoples.

I don't like Alejandro González Iñárritu. Of the three Mexican New Wave directors that broke out into the blockbuster scene, he's the only one that's never struck a chord with me. Guillermo del Toro's ongoing commitment to pure aestheticism is a consistently engaging talent that he's built up over his entire career. I can get behind Alfonso Cuarón depending on what he's doing, but Iñárritu has just never really done it for me. 

And make no mistake, Iñárritu is very much a mainstream talent at this point. He's the Nickelback of art films, creating the safe, sterile version of something that feels edgy and dangerous on the surface so the average audience can feel like they've seen something important and deep; creating stock Oscar Bait dressed up in fancy technical gimmicks to make it more engaging in the moment, but once you look past the spectacle there's no, there there. Birdman's one-shot gimmick is like a surgeon replacing a healthy man's heart with a rubber duck without killing them. Sure, it's impressive that they pulled it off, but there was no reason to do it and it leads to significant problems down the road.

The Revenant, however, appears to be Iñárritu (mostly) dropping the gimmicks and just making a straight-up blockbuster. Remember how Fury Road looked like it was just going to be non-stop crazy car stunts but ultimately reveals itself to be a sweeping epic about personal autonomy and social power dynamics and feminist theory... while still being packed to the gills with crazy car stunts? The Revenant is playing the same game, but in reverse. The based on a true story of an early 19th Century fur trapper crawling his way back to civilization after being left for dead by his company after a brutal bear attack is supposed to be a somber meditation on man vs. nature and the human will to survive set against breathtaking naturalist cinematography and a haunting orchestral score... but it's also about a guy knife-fighting, stick-fighting, gun-fighting, tomahawk swinging, and scalping his way through harsh wilderness driven by pure unfiltered revenge. What Iñárritu has done with The Revenant is smuggle a dirty, nasty intense action melodrama into theaters in January disguised as a "serious" art house Best Picture front runner that millions of people are going to see. 

Leonardo DiCaprio is Hugh Glass, member of a fur trapping expedition in the Louisiana Territory. In 1823, as they're packing pelts for sale down the river, they are attacked by Native Americans and flee into the wilderness, where Glass' half-Indian son quickly becomes a point of contention, especially with Tom Hardy's Fitzgerald. While out scouting for game, he's brutally attacked by a bear and barely survives, Domhnall Gleeson's Captain Andrew Henry orders Fitzgerald to stay with him in his final days, and give him a burial while he leads the rest of the group to try and reach the nearest American fort hundreds of miles away. Quickly tiring of watching a man he hates die, Fitzgerald kills Hugh's son right in front of him, then buries him alive, steals his rifle, and leaves him to die. But out of sheer will, he drags himself out of his shallow grave, covers his gaping wounds with the bearskin that was his shroud, and crawls his way through the forest to find and kill the men that killed his son. (a "revenant" is a creature of European folklore said to be the spirit of the dead returning to terrorize the living, hence the title)

Regardless of how much prestige is attached to this and how much money was spent on it, The Revenant is a B-movie. A gorgeous, carefully crafted B-movie. The gimmick here is that the entire film was shot using only natural lighting. Some days they could only shoot for about 90 minutes, it's an insanely difficult way to make a film. And unlike Birdman's faux One-Take Wonder posturing, here the pretty pictures have a point. The emphasis on natural lighting gives the entire production an otherworldly appearance, like one great big moving landscape painting of human figures rendered small and insignificant next to the awesome power of nature. Which means that when it gets bloody, the violence sticks out even more compared to the pristine environment it takes place in.

A lot of it comes from DiCaprio's performance, he's consistently engaging and believable in the role, he doesn't even speak for most of the film, doing so would distract from the raw emotional artistry of what's happening onscreen. This could be the role that finally gets him an Oscar. If I had any real problem with DiCaprio's turn in this, it's that it will likely overshadow Tom Hardy's impressive in it's own way performance as Fitzgerald.

I don't want to oversell it, for how much The Revenant works in the moment, it's still an Iñárritu film, meaning that it's incredibly self-absorbed, runs a bit too long, and it's nowhere near as insightful or intelligent as it thinks it is. But it's an incredible ride while it lasts, and in the January doldrums, that's a welcome infusion of energy. It's an art house movie for people that don't go to see art house movies, and it's worth seeing at least once.

Have a nice day,

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 3/5