“This is all a bit reminiscent of the hair-raising stories of the production of Werner Herzog’s rainforest epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God, in which arduousness is felt to entail authenticity, as though the movie is a reenactment of the events it records rather than a mere Hollywood facsimile.”
““This film is based on actual historical events,” proclaims a solemn note near the end of the long credits. “Dialogue and certain events and characters contained in the film were created for the purposes of dramatization.” Viewers should be warned, however, that the balance of history and fantasy is actually almost entirely the reverse. The Revenant is, in truth, an almost wholly fictional film. Certain historical events and characters were added for the purposes of verisimilitude.”
“The film almost has a surfeit of natural beauty, spangled with glinting sunlight, not always clearly keyed to what’s happening among the human characters. The rushing rivers, the majestic trees, and the frigid winter landscape dwarf the human presence.”
“The sinister Fitzgerald is given the best line in the film, suggesting a certain anarchic randomness in the world of beast and man. “God,” he gnomically proclaims, “is a squirrel.””
“Despite its flimsy historical underpinnings, The Revenant is actually a dream-film throughout. There are sequences—like the improbable dive over a cliff into the waiting arms of a huge tree, or the abandoned cathedral equipped with a Baroque crucifix and a silently swinging bell—where you aren’t quite sure, and you don’t much mind, if what you’re watching is meant to be “really” happening to Hugh Glass or just transpiring in his (or perhaps Iñárritu’s) head. It’s as though Iñárritu has determined that revenants are uniquely prone to dreams (rêves), and that the moviemaker’s job is to fix them with ardor and arduousness.”