StarCat/CatStar

Alejandro Iñárritu’s
“The Revenant” (Film Review)
by Josh Sczykutowicz
Ice walls and avalanches. Lightning storms and snowfall. Thick forests and
skeletal trees. Packed black dirt and frozen ground. Rushing rivers and candlelit
taverns. Terracotta sunsets and porcelain dawns. These are some of the many
stark images that permeate Alejandro Iñárritu’s latest film, The Revenant,
starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hugh Glass, an 1820’s hunter who is attacked by a
bear and left for dead by Tom Hardy’s partially-scalped, self-preservationist John
Fitzgerald. Suffering extreme physical, personal and spiritual loss, Glass rises
from his wounds intent on revenge, and begins an intense, harrowing journey
through the wilderness that never lets up to the last second.
A follow-up to Iñárritu’s Best Picture-winning Birdman, Iñárritu finds
himself uniting again with acclaimed cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who
more than asserts himself as the finest in his field with this film. A technical
masterpiece, tracking shots seamlessly glide and follow characters, switching
points of view, submerging underwater and lifting back out again, swirling into
the sky and chasing alongside men on horseback before becoming crane shots
that look down at the forest below, taking to the air as cliffs reach their end
without warning.
A nail in the coffin in the film versus digital debate, Lubezki’s stunning
camerawork works exclusively with natural light to achieve the gorgeous and
outstanding shots found within this film. A main criticism of digital filmmaking is
that it lacks the immediacy of shooting on film, with little time limits, yet here,
photographing everything with zero artificial light, every scene depends upon the
position of the sun, of the light of the torches carried through frozen tree lines in
pitch-black nights. That immediacy that the timing of film requires is replicated
here, yet with all of the freedom of technique that digital allow for, as shots seem
to blend with ease into all kinds: close-ups, panoramas, aerial shots, dolly and
tracking shots. While the romanticism of film may be its own virtue, Lubezki’s
unbridled technique and command of the art form seem to prove that
romanticism may be the last defense left in favor of celluloid.
One of Lubezki’s past works, the Oscar-winning cinematography for