“The Revenant is an experience I’ve never had before. It’s totally its own beast. This is not a movie for sissies. It’s beautiful, fierce, immersive, delirious. Submerged in ice, arctic air, brutality and a kind of artful oppression. An ordeal of blood, agony, survival, snow, ice water, wounds and steaming horse guts. Great cinema is not always easy to absorb because it often challenges. It can sometimes feel hard or difficult, gnarly, awesome, almost too much…but it almost always sticks with you.”
This was my first reaction, posted 32 days ago, to Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s immersive masterpiece. The word is out on this puppy — great but no day at the beach — so I wonder how many will be going to see it today. It’s certainly no Christmas heartwarmer. But cineastes will go, of course, especially those who have as little affection for Christmas as I do. Please share your reactions and report about how crowded the room was, and what the vibe felt like on the way out.
From Alan Scherstuhl’s Village Voice review: “What’s been missing for years in Hollywood’s adventure films? Verisimilitude. Correspondent with the rise of computers and the ability to show us any place that filmmakers can imagine, has been the fall of immersiveness — that sense that the actors are in a place you can’t go yourself, rather than just standing against a digitized mock-up of one.