This was one of the most effective films I've ever seen at totally immersing you in a foreign setting (the savage wilderness of the Dakotas in the 1820s) and forcing you to deeply consider what it must have been like to experience the extreme settings the people of that place and time would have endured.
Naturally, this wasn't a movie about the lighter or easier aspects of exploring the frontier and trapping fur but the most brutal extremes even of that occupation. I'd go so far as to say that this was the 2nd most intense film I've ever sat through and a very close 2nd at that behind Mel Gibson's "The passion of the Christ."
If you haven't seen the movie I'm going to be dropping spoilers here and there so be warned*
The movie opens with a serene scene in which Leo and his son are hunting moose in a creek bed while the fur trappers he's working for are cleaning pelts back at their camp. The scenery and shooting for this film is beautiful and combined with the sound editing it helps with the immersion this film is aiming for.
You are taken inside the trappers' camp where Tom Hardy's character is voicing normal business concerns and directing traffic when suddenly you see a naked, scalped man stumbling into the fur trappers camp before he's suddenly cut down by arrow fire...and the brutality unfolds.
As it turns out, the trappers have found themselves caught between a band of Arikara natives and their target, which is whomever has taken the Chief's daughter (it turns out to be French explorers who are the true culprits of this crime).
What unfolds is a series of unfortunate events in which you find the various characters of the film getting caught between parents and their children. Virtually everyone is caught between the Arikara Chief and his daughter, Leo is caught between a mother grizzly and her cubs, and Tom Hardy is caught between Leo and his son. In every instance the result is the parent enacting graphically-depicted brutality on whomever finds themselves in their crosshairs.
Captain Andrew Henry, played by Domhnall Gleeson, is basically the stand-in for the modern viewer. He's doing all he can to impose civilized ethics in a primitive environment but is ultimately unable to prevent all of the savagery from taking over and is eventually killed himself when caught in the middle of Leo's quest for vengeance against Hardy for killing his son.
While a shockingly brutal depiction of human interaction like "Game of thrones" is aiming to underscore the meaninglessness of life and lack of an ultimate higher purpose (or at least a good one), the Revenant's violence has a different feel and purpose to it.
One of Inarritu's main aims seems to be exploring the extremes of human experience and forcing us to weigh and feel the difficulty of looking to impose modern human standards on a primitive, untamed world. He's not looking to shock us and there isn't entertainment here in the sense where viewers are eager to see what kind of horrifying event will unfold next. Each violent scene is painful to watch and set up as something to be endured and felt rather than something to anticipate and be shocked by in an entertaining sense.
There is a sort of deconstructive unveiling here though in the revelation that if there isn't a guiding force to impose civilization then people will resort to animalistic instincts, looking to survive and ensure the survival of their offspring. Because even watching the film is such an intense experience you are pushed to be more realistic when considering how you might handle the different ethical dilemmas and situations of the story.
There's some value to that aspect of the grimly violent storytelling here in that the viewer has to interact with violence as a reality in the world to be navigated rather than simply an abstract deconstruction. Whereas "Game of thrones" can push you to throw away ethics as a convention of simpler minds or the burden of those who don't hold power, "the Revenant" will push you to examine how to preserve ethics for the sake of preserving ourselves from savagery.
You also can't help but consider the fact that Inarritu is a Mexican (or at least I can't) and there is a clash today between Mexican and American cultures along the border with familial instincts often taking precedent over the rule of law or modern civilizational standards. However if you consider that struggle in light of the movie you won't find any answers, just concerns.
There's also an attempt by Inarritu's to reference higher purpose and meaning with Leo's decision to forego vengeance and find another purpose to drive him to survive. Perhaps he sees this as the ultimate solution to the problem of how to sort out the inevitable conflicts between different people who are trying to survive and raise children.
Whether this is successfully conveyed in the movie I'm not as sure. One problem here is that Leo doesn't really forego his vengeance. He stabs Hardy and has already nearly killed him when he decides to "pass up" the ultimate act of snuffing out his life in order to hand him over to the Arikara chief who happens to be passing by for this scene. After doing so, the chief immediately completes the deed himself and scalps Hardy, who is a man already embittered from having been scalped in the past.
There's a sense here in which it's depicted as though God were ultimately responsible for judgment and he reliably hands it down to Hardy's character but what other outcome would Leo even have expected? He does pass up the chance to savagely kill Hardy himself (fortunately for the viewer, at this point it'd make for a horrifying conclusion to sit through a drawn out murder) but what he does is almost equally cruel and highly likely to bring the same result.
A modern way of telling this story would be to have Leo bring Hardy in and hand him over to the law, in a Christian telling (or in the real life event the movie is based on) perhaps Leo would forgive Hardy and send him on his way to Texas. Inarritu's post-modern conclusion is to give in to extremes and hand over Hardy to the savage Arikara and then rationalize this decision as giving up vengeance to a higher power before pressing on for new purpose and meaning in life in order to stay motivated to keep drawing breath.
What's ironically lost in this existentialism is any kind of uniting social ethic that could save us from savagery but instead simply a "whatever it takes to make things work for you" conclusion. There's no real sacrifice, no real ethic, just coping mechanisms for the individual. The only guy who tried to live for something greater than himself was killed.
You are left to wonder what it is that actually saved us from the brutality of the frontier and what could save us if we ever slipped back.
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