"The Revenant" R
The guy who directed Birdman directs a DiCaprio and Hardy thriller on a snowy mountain in the 1820s in The Revenant.
These fur trappers are going about with their catch of furs, and the gory mess of having skinned hides around their camp, when the local Indians attack the camp and try to dispatch them with arrows. The have flint lock rifles and knives and axes. The men escape to a boat where they argue about abandoning the boat down river to avoid the French trappers and more of the Indians.
DeCaprio plays a guide who has a half Indian son, which the other crewmen find disgusting, and they attempt to berate him frequently. During a tracking excursion on land, he is attacked and mauled by a bear and is later rescued, but is clearly near death.
The trapper leader decides to split the force and let Hard's character stay with the wounded guy, but he would rather just cut and run. So he arranges the death of the son while his trainee is off scouting, and then buries DeCaprio's character alive. He convinced his man to move on.
While the men wander back into the edge of the frontier, near the army fort, they keep quiet about what happened out there.
The lost scout guy then somehow crawls out of the grave, doesn't freeze in snow, and pulls himself by his sheer will about trying to recover. Keep in mind he has been thoroughly mauled and has claw gashes all over his back, and his right foot is twisted backwards, and his leg is broken, and one arm is mauled, and one shoulder.
Through the course of probably a week, the trappers all reach the base, while the lost man recovers miraculously thanks to his own survival skills somehow, and apparently Wolverine like healing factors, and Indian magic too (a healing lodge or something a native builds for him). He also spends a night in a fallen dead horse's belly.
Then it's back to the camp to try and get his revenge on those who abandoned him.
Oscar bait, probably, for the leads.
The actual story of the pioneers that inspired the legend in the movie that is based on a book can be found online. Apparently Hugh Glass was a dramatized figure similar to folks like Paul Bunyun and Daniel Boone and his exploits in 1823 were loosely based on an actual person.
The movie and book differ in that the leg breaking happened a full series of months before, and he got it fixed, and the bear attack happened the following summer.
Fitzgerald did leave him for dead, but the repayment is not as it was in the movie. In the account from hearsay sent to a Pennsylvania paper in 1823, and other sources, Fitzgerald in fact escaped never to be caught, and his young ward is left to take the blame, but Glass refuses to kill him.
In all accounts until the Revenanat book from the early 200os, there is no half Indian son. He is not in any previous version. This means that the author and the movie director merely wanted to have a stronger message, when there was really none.
Also the stuff that seemed silly and impossible made more sense in the hearsay stories, from lore, in that it wasn't several days of him in the snow, and he wasn't totally destroyed by the bear. He was just messed up. Then it made more sense he could recover on his miles long crawl or hike, and he didn't just fix his leg somehow or his back.
Unlike Crockett though, he was not so glamorous in lore, but was just out to survive.
Review by Adam Browne
No comments:
Post a Comment