I could almost leave it at that, but I suppose it does need more explanation.
First, though:
You know, I'm not going to complain about DiCaprio getting best actor for this. I think a role like this is probably pretty tough. And I don't just mean the rigorous conditions. I mean the not being able to use your voice. There's not a lot of talking in this one. DiCaprio did a more than adequate job of carrying the movie with his facial expressions and stumbling around, much better than Redmayne did last year, at any rate. However, I think Bale would have been the better choice for The Big Short. If he'd been nominated for best actor, that is. What's up with that?
And I don't particularly like Christian Bale.
The movie is beautiful. Even in its terror, it's beautiful. The cinematography is, in a word, amazing.
But, beyond that, the movie doesn't offer much. In that way, you can take "terrible" to mean whatever you want it to. What I can say is that, at the end of the movie, I wasn't left feeling anything. Maybe that's the way Inarritu intended it, but I don't want to watch a movie and then feel nothing. My actual thought when the screen went from DiCaprio's face to the credits was, "Oh... That's it?" There was no joy, no sadness, no nothing. No catharsis. There wasn't even anything to think about as there was at the end of Birdman. It was just over.
Now, this next thing is my own bias:
People talk about this movie as if it is just a revenge tale, but that's not true. It's not even mostly true. Mostly, it's a survival tale. I tend to not like fictional survival tales. They're just... too outrageous. Once you've decided your hero is going to survive, you can do anything you want to the character and, guess what, he survives! I have a hard time with Hugh Glass surviving the trials he went through. A real Hugh Glass, that is. Still, I was willing to go along with it for a while, even the trips in the freezing water, but [SPOILER ALERT!] going over the cliff on the horse was just too much for me. Okay, so was putting gun powder in his wound and igniting it. Clever but too much.
See, if you give me something like 127 Hours, I'm good. That really happened. The things Aron Ralston did to survive were amazing, but it's amazing because it's real. Nothing Hugh Glass did to survive or that he survived was amazing, because it was all a fiction. There's nothing triumphant and nothing to cheer. Then, there's the ending...
Also, there's Tom Hardy. I have nothing good to say about Hardy. Maybe if he takes a role that's more than guttural mumbling.
