The Revenant was Wildly Overrated

Still sick, and what better way to pass the time than to watch Leonardo DiCaprio have it much much much worse off than me? I’ve been so busy the last while that I haven’t been able to really watch much of anything, and I’ve corrected that over the past few days. I was excited to see The Revenant. It had gotten so many awards and nominations, it had to be great, right?

Wrong.

DiCaprio won a Best Actor award for this performance? I’m sorry. I just don’t see it. Yes, he went though a grueling experience to film the movie. From what I’ve read, the whole thing was absolutely miserable, with setback after setback. But this wasn’t some big risk they were all taking. They were making a film, and they chose to make it in a really hard way.

Congratulations?

So if I decide to get my library work done barefoot and up to my waist in a freezing cesspool of filth while being pummeled by professional wrestlers and required to keep singing the entire lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody backwards in French for three hours, does that mean I magically get the award for Librarian of the Year?

I might wish it does, but the fact would be that the end result would be the same as doing my job the normal way. I just chose to make things much, much harder on myself in the process.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a very well-filmed movie. The cinematography is spot on. It’s impressive that they used almost no visual effects. But I would argue that you could take just about any actor, throw this amount of money on the screen, and ask them to grunt and groan in agony for 2.5 hours, and you’d end up with about the same performance. There’s no interaction with people. (Sure, there’s interaction with a bear, but . . . how much acting skill does it really take to scream in agony for a while, then be unconscious, feverish, and completely out of it.)

Some of this might just be chalked up to the fact that the plot is so thin you’ve basically seen the movie as soon as you’ve seen a trailer or even an ad for the film. Man. Bear. Winter. Revenge. The end. It’s seriously like someone tried to come up with 1,000 ways to torture DiCaprio, and they thought filming it all would be great.

It’s not a bad movie. It’s just not worthy of all the accolades it got. Not even half of them.  3/5 Move along, folks. Nothing to see here.

Leave a comment

×