I did not much like the film but I concede that it will perhaps prove a turning point for the genre like Shane, High Noon and many John Ford westerns. Still, I did not like the film.
There are two scenes which will revolutionize the Western genre, the Indian attack and the bear attack. Additionally, the movie is grand in its depiction of the landscape but that of course had already been done a half a century earlier by John Ford.
These considerations are visual rather than storyline but the cinema is after all a visual experience and advances in that experience are noteworthy and should be acknowledged.
The storyline in the movie is weak, the vapid spiritualism in the movie is misplaced, the motivation of Hugo Glass for revenge is contrived or at least I thought so since I knew the true story of this extraordinary and epic journey and I know that it had nothing to do with the murder of Hugh Glass' son so perhaps I was put off by this dramatic contrivance.
My review from January 17,
The art of screenwriting, it seems to me, is to present the character with a series of circumstances which forces him to draw deep within himself and risk everything to overcome the obstacles put in his path by the storyline. The storyline in this movie is really a man motivated by revenge but the screenwriter, it seems to me, tries to relieve that arid motivation with contrived scenes of Indian spiritualism and the normally politically correct portions of the evil white man.
It is the motivation that the moviemakers get wrong and it is the gratuitous political correctness concerning Indians inserted into the film that distort the pristine story.
See the movie, it is a turning point in Western films because of the virtuosity of the technology in depicting the bear attack and to a lesser degree the scope of the cinematography. Not since Jaws have we seen such a turning point of this particular cinematic action.
