Partly shot in outwardly unspoiled tracts in Canada and Argentina, it has the brilliant, crystalline look that high-definition digital can provide, with natural vistas that seem to go on forever and suggest the seeming limitless bounty that once was. DiCaprio, and some of the most beautiful natural tableaus you’re likely to see in a movie this year. Iñárritu ( “Birdman,” “Babel”), it features a battalion of very fine, hardworking actors, none more diligently committed than Mr. “The Revenant” is an American foundation story, by turns soaring and overblown.
The setting could not be more striking or the men more flinty. This, though, is no Arcadia it’s 1823 in the Great Plains, a pitiless testing ground for men that’s littered with the vivid red carcasses of skinned animals, ghastly portents of another slaughter shortly to come. He enters dressed in a greasy, fur-trimmed coat, holding a flintlock rifle while stealing through a forest primeval that Longfellow might have recognized.
In “The Revenant,” a period drama reaching for tragedy, Leonardo DiCaprio plays the mountain man Hugh Glass, a figure straight out of American myth and history.