Six or seven weeks ago some blowhard over-simplistically suggested that reactions to The Revenant might divide along gender lines. The idea came from first-hand observation and first-hand heresay, but it was wrong, terribly wrong, to generalize like this. The guy who tweeted this silly, shoot-from-the-hip notion suffered hate and hyena-bites for weeks, and rightly so. We’re all free-thinking individuals under God’s immense sky, and to suggest that gender might have a little something to do with our reactions to this or that film…well, it’s just despicable when someone says something like this. And the fact that we haven’t yet seen a revgirls hashtag is…well, it’s just fucking meaningless.

From The Guardian‘s Carole Cadwalladr: “Alejandro González Iñárritu’s idea was for it to look as real as possible. Which would have been magnificent if there was something in the way of a story or any meditation on the nature of retribution or anyone — anyone — that you could give one toss about, but there’s not. So the landscape is chilling and the violence is pointless and the whole thing is meaningless. A vacuous revenge tale that is simply pain as spectacle. The Revenant is pain porn.

“And in all probability, it will win every Oscar going. Critics have lavishly praised its ‘visceral’ imagery, its ‘authentic’ feel; it is, they say,’immersive’ filmmaking at its finest. Though, arguably, not as immersive as putting a camera in a cage and then setting a man on fire. Have you seen that one? Where the man is burned alive? It’s not by González Iñárritu, but Isis. It wasn’t nominated for anything but the pain is even more real, more visceral, more — what was the word, thrilling? — than DiCaprio’s.”