Film Review: The Revenant

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited to see The Revenant. The film seemed to have all the bases covered: high critical acclaim, an excellent crew and cast, and an engrossing historical setting to boot. Unfortunately, all the above only served to make The Revenant all the more disappointing by the time the credits began to roll.

Without giving too much of the plot away, The Revenant tells the story of a fur trapper's battle to survive and to exact revenge upon the trapper who left him for dead (among other trespasses). It is a simple story, sure enough, but sometimes the simplest stories can be most powerful, a thought which most likely crossed director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu's mind at some point. The Revenant attempts to create and transmit a powerful story by conveying the sheer suffering which the aforesaid fur trapper, Hugh Glass (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), endures in his quest for survival and revenge.

Unfortunately for The Revenant, Glass' suffering is conveyed in such an extreme way that it ceases to be relatable, and even borders on the realm of comedy at times. At one point, for example, after battling through wild animal attacks, broken bones, and the freezing cold, Glass is chased off a cliff by a war party of Arikara Native Americans, and hits a large tree on the way down. I admit I had to stifle a giggle at that moment, and I was certainly not the only member of the audience to do so. During that moment, Glass ceased to be a suffering hero and started to become just a guy who can't catch a break. For the most part though, his suffering isn't touching, it's just exhausting.

Stunning Views: Sadly one of the film's best features.

The Revenant isn't all bad though. Shortly after leaving the cinema, I noticed a bus pass by with an advert for the film plastered on its side, bearing numerous groupings of four and five stars. One of the latter was attributed to Empire Magazine, with the excuse that The Revenant instilled 'an astonishing sensory experience' in viewers. If the capacity to engender such an experience was the only assessment criterion for a film, then Empire's five stars may well be justified. The early 19th century wilderness is painted beautifully by Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography, from its stunning vistas to its hellish conditions. In fact, 'Best Cinematography' is one of the few Oscar categories which The Revenant ought to stand a chance of winning, rather than the smorgasbord of nominations it has received. The music and soundtrack are also quite impressive.

 

Sadly, the astonishing sensory experience instilled by The Revenant's cinematography does not extend to its direction or acting. You can't fault the actors too much for that though, they simply were not given enough material to tell a compelling story. It would be remiss to say the film does not have its moments. A particularly touching one, where Glass shares a chuckle with a Pawnee Native American he meets along his journey through the wilderness, is so touching because of the brief respite it offers from the odyssey of suffering that is the rest of the film. However, films that are complimented on distinct moments are often so because they fail to sustain a continuous sense of momentousness. It's usually fine for a romantic comedy, but with a film like The Revenant, that seems to want to convey such a sense, it makes its shortcomings all the more apparent.    

Book Review: The Man in the High Castle

Call it a New Year's resolution if you will, but as 2015 drew to a close, I decided that I wanted to become better acquainted with the work of Philip K. Dick, the well known science fiction author. I had always been a fan of science fiction as a genre, in film as well as literature, but my particular interest in Dick's work arose from a greater interest in what you could call 'intellectual' science fiction. To draw a comparison between two films, any incarnation of the Star Wars franchise would be a good example of 'entertaining' science fiction, which primarily serves the purpose that the category implies. Blade Runner (and the novel upon which it is based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, also written by Dick), on the other hand, is also entertaining, but is certainly more intellectual and artistic, given that it uses science fiction as a means to think about present and, most likely, future issues.

And so began my merry romp through the work of Philip K. Dick, beginning with his Hugo Award-winning novel, The Man in the High Castle. I decided to begin with it partially because it ranks among his best-know and most celebrated works, but mostly because of its setting. When I learned that the novel took place in an alternate history, in which the Axis powers won the Second World War, I was immediately curious as to how Dick imagined and conveyed the resulting world. After all, the deeper into an alternate history one decides to set a story, the more challenging it is to tell a credible story that does not fall apart when its underlying assumptions, historical or otherwise, are called into question.

In the novel, the former United States of America are more
or less divided as shown above between the
Japanese Empire and the Nazi Reich.

I was very pleasantly, and perhaps not all that, surprised. As soon as I began The Man in the High Castle, I was immediately engrossed by the immersive post-war world which the novel's characters inhabited. This reaction did not owe little to my original curiosity, but I believe the writing itself deserves the greatest credit. After all, while many of the story's characters reflect on their history and wonder what might have happened if the Axis powers had not won the war, their reflections arise from a very well-established sense of acceptance of their present global order, in which the Japanese Empire and the Nazi Reich govern the world and that is simply the way of things.

About halfway through the novel, however, I began to realise something. I noticed that The Man in the High Castle had managed to propel me through to its midway point on little more than its setting. The story followed the lives of various characters living in this alternate past, but their lives seemed loosely connected at most, and there was not much of a plot to speak of. In a timely response to my thoughts, however, the plot of The Man in the High Castle slowly began to emerge. Before long, like the novel's characters, I too accepted the setting of the story as the connections between the characters became increasingly apparent and the resulting, fast-paced episodes had me rushing through pages during the wee hours of the morning.

When I closed the back cover of The Man in the High Castle, I had yet another realisation. While the book was certainly thought provoking, it was not intellectual stimulation which I most associated with it. Rather, I wallowed in the conclusion that I had been thoroughly entertained, at first by the novel's setting, and subsequently by its plot. This is not to say The Man in the High Castle was not intellectually stimulating at all. Quite on the contrary. The acceptance of the vast majority of the global population to the story's geopolitical world order, for example, served as a sobering reminder that humans might be able to get used to just about anything. That being said, I was ultimately impressed by the novel's ability to be artistic and entertaining in equal parts, and on that basis, I would recommend it to anyone whose curiosity in the book might just have been sparked.