TonyWatchesMovies Movie Review: The Revenant: 6.5 out of 10

"But Tony! The Revenant won Leonardo Di Caprio the Oscar and got a bunch of other nominations too! Why did you give it such a low score?!" I hear you shouting into your computer. The Revenant is by no means a bad movie, and if anybody deserves an Oscar it's Leonardo Di Caprio, but he certainly didn't deserve it for this movie (see instead The Departed, Titanic, Blood Diamond, Gangs of New York, This Boy's Life, Django Unchained, Revolutionary Road, Catch Me if You Can, seriously, so many others). There were just too many things I didn't like about The Revenant for me to give it a high score.

TonyWatchesMovies Score: 6.5 out of 10

THIS MOVIE WAS SO GODDAMN SLOW. Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Slow doesn't necessarily mean bad, but when you're sporting about a half a million 10 minute-long shots of the Canadian mountains, it can get really boring after a while. Especially when Leo had just gotten done doing something awesome and then suddenly it's a shot of a snowy forest that doesn't go away. If it had happened just a couple times, it would have been a good way to punctuate intense scenes. Overall, I was not a fan of how slow that made the movie as a whole.

I was so pissed that the voices of the Native Americans didn't sync up. In the first scene, it was very noticeable, and I thought that they would fix it for the rest of the film, but no. It was off almost every time. What was up with that?! This is an A-list movie, why would they trip up over something so easy as syncing audio? After some research, apparently there were some problems with the timecode for the ADR sessions or something stupid like that, but it didn't matter to me what their excuse was. As a sound designer myself, I would never have allowed the Revenant out of my hands until every vocal track is synced correctly and the audio is sourced to the correct 5.1 outputs.

On a lighter note, I thought the performances of Leonardo Di Caprio and Tom Hardy were fantastic, but to me Hardy took the cake. He played such an amazing bad guy, I hated him throughout the entire film he was so evil, and I love it when someone makes me hate them. It means they put actual thought into making a person who is truly bad to the core, not somewhat likeable, but bad to the core. He was ruthless, cold-hearted, and cowardly, all things I love in a bad guy. He should have won an Oscar for his performance in the Revenant, not nominated for Mad Max: Fury Road.

So, overall, the movie was good, but the slowness and the messed up audio really brought down my enjoyment as a whole.

Cheers,

-TonyWatchesMovies