Enter Pursued by a Bear

Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant is titled like a horror movie, but it isn't one. It also isn't exactly an action/adventure movie either. Stylistically, it's something like a cross between Terrence Malick's Tree of Life and The New World with Joe Carnahan's The Grey. (Since I'm mentioning films that I love, this is me telling you that I loved The Revenant.) If The Revenant looks like a Malick movie (it's shot by the great Emmanuel Lubezki) and is plotted like a survival or disaster film, the story of The Revenant is revenge. And revenge is one of my absolute favorite things.

The film is contemplative and very slow at times – a couple exiting the theatre with me wondered Why did they show so much of the scenery? – focusing on the world inhabited by these eighteenth-century colonialists. This slowness and contemplation makes the film gorgeous, of course, but it is also what the film is about to a large extent, the way violence exists on the surface of a world that is beautiful. The natural world itself is also incredibly violent – particularly in the snow-covered mountains and icy waters the men are traversing. Perhaps I am reading this into the film, but the film's violence, shocking though it is at times, and often extremely brutal, is also beautiful. In this way, it seemed to me that for Iñárritu, the natural world and then men and women who are a part of it are all violent, and all capable of beauty, even when they are violent. (This seems to me a larger theme in Iñárritu's work – think back to that incredible shot of the blood bubbling on the Teppan grill in Amores Perros.)

The Revenant – like the director's non-Birdman films – is also very interested in worlds colliding, in different languages (there are at least three in the film, including extended sequences in Pawnee), in the problems that are bred out of miscommunication, and in the inhumanity that accompanies racism. Like all of Iñárritu's films, The Revenant is also interested in magic, in powers and abilities that don't seem to make sense through scientific explanation. This makes the film seem both improbable and also constantly wondrous. I spent much of the movie with my jaw dropped, shocked at the images onscreen. In the film's first act, Leonardo DiCaprio is brutally mauled by a bear: His throat is torn open, his back ripped to shreds. And from this, he comes back. That he continues to survive despite absurdly harsh weather conditions, three different groups of people who wish to kill him, and the terrifying wildlife of the Americas, is both improbable and amazing to watch.

But The Revenant doesn't have the quality of absurdity that might accompany the jumps and explosions in a James Bond film or something from the Mission: Impossible series. Instead, one wonders about the man's existence itself. Is he dead? Is he a spirit? A ghost? A zombie? Can he be killed at all? Is there some earth-magic that is keeping this man's shell alive so that he can execute justice on his enemy?

Alternating wild action sequences and vicious, violent fights with slow consideration of rivers, waterfalls, sky, and even fire, The Revenant is a kind of superb meditation on everything. What does it mean to be racist out in the middle of nowhere when humans should be working together to survive? What does it mean to get revenge in the middle of nowhere, completely outside of society? What are barbarism and civilization? What is humanity's limit? What are the limits of the human body?

The Revenant is perfectly directed. It is gorgeously scored by Ryuichi Sakamoto (it's my favorite score of the year, and of course it is ineligible for the Oscar because the Music branch is insanely twisted). The movie is impeccably shot and edited; it is no exaggeration to say that Lubezki might and probably should win his third consecutive Oscar.) And it is superbly acted – Domnhall Gleeson's work is particularly great, providing exactly what is needed in DiCaprio's most emotional sequences, and I thought Will Poulter was exceptional as well, but all of the performances are excellent.

The Revenant is certainly not for everyone, but I loved it.

Lone Survivor

I've been told by Dayne that this is "a very drunk post", and I did write it after drinking half a bottle of rosé, so be forewarned.

Here's the thing: when you title your film Lone Survivor and you show the audience who that survivor is in the film's first five minutes, it becomes difficult to maintain the tension a survival film needs.

As far as I am concerned, Peter Berg was in trouble as soon as we started. If I was invested in the four men who go on this mission to kill a random dude (and I was invested in them), I also knew – again, from the film's first few minutes – that they were all going to die except for the, ahem, lone survivor, played by Mark Wahlberg.

I'm actually sort of baffled by the way this film was made, because it really is a high-quality thing for much of its running time. The sound is awesome. The makeup is awesome. The photography is top-notch. The acting is great (I love me some Mark Wahlberg, as you probably know I see everything he does, and I absolutely fucking adore Ben Foster – who is as fantastic in this as he is in everything else). Better yet, this could've been a pretty great survival movie. And who doesn't love a survival movie? Deliverance is very good, but 2012's totally fantastic The Grey by Joe Carnahan is totally worth your time.

Lone Survivor just isn't that, though. Instead it is a picture about four guys who go out to kill some random Arabs about whom we know absolutely nothing. So they go off to do this and then people start shooting at them and stuff. And, well, I sort of understood why people were shooting at them. And I still don't know what we're doing in Afghanistan. And the word Taliban is used a lot, but I am not really sure what that means anymore, and in the context of Lone Survivor it only means "bad".

Mr. Foster, Mr. Hirsch, and  Mr. Wahlberg: not doing so hot.

This isn't to say that I didn't like these guys. They were great guys – funny, charming, interesting. I'd probably have a great time having a beer with any of them. But their deaths were inevitable from the film's first frame, and the deaths of the dozens and dozens of Afghanis also seemed inevitable.

I find all of this killing troubling, as you might imagine, but I also find it troubling that the film is fundamentally not interested in interrogating questions about who deserves to live and who deserves to die. There is a long-ish Deliverance-inspired conversation at the beginning of act two about precisely this question, but the arguments never even reach the level of intelligence of Burt Reynolds' monologue in Boorman's film. We remain well entrenched in clichés. And the possibility of being on CNN as the next Lynndie England is more important to these men than moral obligations or ethical decisions.

I was not unmoved by Lone Survivor. Ben Foster, when he dies, talks about his wife and brotherhood and the Navy, and I really responded to that. But Lone Survivor wears out its welcome. It's twenty minutes too long, and it never manages to justify all of the killing it puts on display. As for the lone survivor himself, he's intense and never boring to watch as a performer. The film he's in, however, had me checking my watch. When do we get to the end – which, I may remind you, we've already seen at the film's opening?  

Are we there yet?

(Sober) Addendum

I forgot to say, too, that I was just stunned by the amount of U.S. military firepower that is mobilized at the end of the film. This is something that Lone Survivor has in common with Captain Phillips. In both films, it is as if the U.S. military is a kind of sleeping giant that doesn't enact its full power unless truly angered. In other words, instead of U.S. military tactics subtending the entire action of these films, both Lone Survivor and Captain Phillips behave as though USAmerican agents act on their own (in Phillips, an unarmed naval crew, in Survivor a heavily armed but isolated foursome) and are not actually supported, trained, funded, protected, and armed by the U.S. military. But once the men get into trouble in both films, the (apparently) full might of the United States descends onto the small number of men who have dared to test this sleeping giant. In both films, the military acts as a kind of exercitus ex machina, triumphantly, impossibly, and with unimaginable power, sweeping in and saving the day.

But this is all a trick – a trick of narrative that serves a specific ideological function. The U.S. military has caused everything in Lone Survivor. The men get sent onto this mountain as a military directive. They get abandoned on the mountain because the military is stretched too thin in Afghanistan. They are there, in fact, to kill the man who then fights back and attempts to kill them. And then when the Navy's four foot-soldiers do not succeed in killing the two men that it has all-along planned to kill, the Navy sends in a large number of helicopters and guns down everyone in sight. Why it didn't do this in the first place and why it allowed all of the soldiers who died to die is the Navy's business, of course, but the film pretends as though it isn't. Lone Survivor pretends that all along the four SEALs are fighting against an army much bigger than them. With its army-from-the-machine narrative device, however, Lone Survivor exposes the lie at its center: all of these deaths – the three SEALs, the rescue troupe, the Afghan fighters – have been, if not carefully, at least deliberately, orchestrated by U.S. military policy in Afghanistan.

Kon-Tiki vs. Life of Pi

Apparently, I liked Life of Pi when I first saw it, and I guess I should stick with that opinion because I have no intention of re-watching the film. But last evening I sat down and watched Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's Kon-Tiki and all I could do was compare it to Ang Lee's beloved film from last year.

First off, Kon-Tiki, unlike Life of Pi, is not a kids' film, and it doesn't have the kind of storytelling frame that Pi has, where the story is told to us by an unreliable narrator.

More importantly, Kon-Tiki is a true story, an actual historical event that took place in the late 1940s. Kon-Tiki is the tale of a group of six men who sailed from South America to the Polynesian islands – in other words: five thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean – on a raft. Kon-Tiki, though, always seems real. And I am sure that some of the film was done using CGI. I have no doubt of it, in fact, but it never looked fake. These guys are sailing the ocean on a raft and they look like they are in the ocean on a raft. (I don't know if you remember Life of Pi, but what with the fake tiger and the flying fish and the fake sunsets and the fake water and the fake animals, I never felt like I was in the real world at all.)

Kon-Tiki is an adventure/journey story, rather in the mode of Deliverance, The Way Back, or The Grey: so it is really a movie about testing the mettle of a group of men who are alone in the wild with no one to help them but their own ingenuity and a bunch of blind luck. It is gorgeously made, with impressive and immaculate costume design and a group of actors doing fine work, and I have to say I found most of it rather gripping.

Rønning and Sandberg's movie has its share of clichéd scenes – the terrified and useless Ned Beatty character from Deliverance is embodied in this case by a tubby refrigerator salesman played by Anders Baasmo Christiansen – but it also has a few filled with extraordinary tension. There is a sequence where the men literally grab a shark out of the ocean and eviscerate it on the raft that left me with my mouth gaping.

All in all, Kon-Tiki is something like Life of Pi for grown-ups. Kon-Tiki doesn't take the (child's) point of view that the world is magical; it looks at the Earth, thinks about it scientifically, and still finds the world wonderful.