Reviews

When a Brit buddy recommended this BBC series set in a UK obstetrics & gynecology ward, he said they could never make a series like that in North America.

During the first ep, we were treated to a certain amount of nudity, including a brief shadowy glimpse of pubic hair, so I thought that was what he'd meant. In the first season finale, we're confronted with the sight of a baby's head sticking out of a very realistic vagina. Not the first we've seen & not a brief glimpse either; the whole episode revolves around this baby being stuck & their attempts (including deliberately breaking its collarbone) to get it out. Now I was sure this was what he meant.

Clearly, what we were seeing couldn't have been real; it's not like they could just hire some pregnant woman to give birth on the show & pause with the baby half in & half out. You can only assume the distended vagina & baby's head were plastic constructs, but the straining labia & the wet matted pubic hair were so utterly realistic as to make no difference. They'd gone to meticulous - some might say extreme - lengths to present the reality of an OB/GYN ward. My friend was right, you'd never see anything even resembling that on North American TV.

A few eps in tho, I also came to realize this show was fundamentally different in a more important way from the numerous medical series I enjoy regularly. In the series I've been watching, all the doctors & medical staff - with very few exceptions - are decidedly professional & assiduously dedicated to patient welfare. The unethical or incompetent exceptions are anomalies sooner or later weeded out. (Before going further, I want to say I still believe the majority of doctors do their well-intentioned best according to their fallible human abilities.) -Which makes Bodies all the more shocking:

In Bodies, the doctors' main concerns are statistics, façade, prestige, money & covering your ass. I knew then that was also what he'd meant. The plot revolves around young registrar (UK equivalent of a resident) Rob Lake and a right-minded anesthetist reporting a senior doctor's dangerous incompetence & being subsequently crushed by a vindictive administration. Never have I seen a series really zero in on the arrogance, incompetence & deceit of some medical practitioners & the readiness of hospital administrations to cover it up. You don't see that on North American TV either. Kudos for a truly ground-breaking series.

The trailer for The Favourite is misleading, stringing together all the fun bits to create the impression of a light-hearted drawing-room comedy, whereas the film itself was something else. Not that it wasn't good, mind you; aside from its obscure overlong ending, it was ok.

In the early 1700s, Abigail (Emma Stone), a young former aristocrat whose station in life has fallen, applies for work in the court of Queen Anne. She begins in the scullery, but soon becomes a lady-in-waiting to the powerful Lady Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz). The domineering Sarah, Queen Anne's lover & trusted advisor, more often than not sits in for the ailing Anne & in effect rules in her stead. Meanwhile, Abigail, endears herself to Anne by soothing her gouty leg with a rustic herbal remedy apparently unknown at court.

By the time Sarah - belatedly recognizing a potential rival - dismisses Abigail, the queen is sufficiently beguiled to add Abigail to her own retinue. Abigail soon contrives to supplant Sarah as the queen's favorite. When Sarah haughtily insists that the queen dismiss Abigail, Anne answers "I don't want to. I like it when she puts her tongue inside me."

What makes this film worth watching at all is the outstanding performance of Olivia Colman as Queen Anne. Ailing, cranky, vulnerable, imperious, cosseted, frivolous & browbeaten, Anne is a goodhearted queen with the very best of intentions, but far too muddleheaded to fathom affairs of state. When - after gifting her beloved Sarah with a palace - she is told "This is a monstrous extravagance . . . we are at war," Anne replies "We've won." When told that the war is not yet over, she is taken quite aback. "Oh! I did not know that."

What Favourite lacks, it seems to me, is an ending - tho not for lack of trying. The telling moment when Abigail, now well ensconced as the queen's spoiled favorite, casually squashes one of Anne's beloved rabbits with her foot - not fatally, just meanly enough to demonstrate her sense of power & her potential cruelty - could have been the ending. We're shown how quickly the underdog we originally rooted for, once risen to power, becomes the new oppressor. Stop there.

But no, the rabbit's cries wake the by now partially paralyzed queen, who, horrified, tries to rise from her bed, falls & then struggles to her feet as Abigail rushes to her. "Rub my leg" Anne commands coldly & Abigail reluctantly kneels to obey. When she suggests that Anne should lie down, she is told "You shall speak when asked to." Claiming to feel dizzy & needing to "hold onto something," she grabs Abigail's hair & presses down on her head while the kneeling Abigail struggles to support Anne's weight while still rubbing her gouty leg. Her distress, both physical & mental, is clear on her face, as is the slow realization that she is no more than a helpless rabbit herself. That too would have been a good place to stop.

To belabor the point tho, we watch the two women sway together in this position, their faces now superimposed on one another for an interminable two minutes until finally the rabbits are gradually superimposed on both of them till they're blotted out. So what's that all about then? We're all just helpless rabbits? Is that some kind of revelation? Shoulda quit while they were ahead.

A father, Will, & his 13-year-old daughter, Tom, are living off the grid in a tent in an Oregon state park. We're given no idea why or how long except Will seems to have some kind of PTSD. They get discovered, busted & resettled on a Christmas tree farm till Will, who refuses all offers of help for his problem, decides it's time to escape.

They make it to Washington State, where Tom nearly dies of exposure & Will's seriously injured soon after. They get rescued by some kind folks who live in a trailer park community nearby. Soon as he can walk properly tho, Will decides it's time to move on again. When Tom protests, he's unable to explain, unwilling even to try. Tom accompanies him, then suddenly decides to turn back. End of story. Well so what?

We can understand Tom's longing to remain in a good-hearted community, but we have no idea what it is that drives Will to keep them off the grid in the first place. There's never enough character development to give a damn about either of them. One of those slow, boring & ultimately movies that leave you asking "Why am I watching this?" Or more to the point, why did they bother to make this film? Captain Fantastic (2016) already did a similar story with lots of human warmth & some touches of humor, as opposed to all this grim pointless desperation.

Back home I watched "I, Daniel Blake". Quite a different film from the impression created by the trailer. In the trailer, you're shown all the upbeat stand-fast rebellious moments; you're given the feeling this plucky little man will prevail. In the film, you experience the grinding soul-devastating hopelessness of desperate poverty through the eyes of a good simple man suddenly at the mercy of a bureaucracy that's forgotten how to care. An excellent film with fine performances by Dave Johns & Hayley Squires, but not one I ever want to watch again. Just too damn real.

Thought I'd seen Long Goodbye before, but, watching it, I soon realized I hadn't - probably because I never liked Elliot Gould & could never picture him as Philip Marlowe. Not that he was any more incongruous than any other part of that film. Tho they still had him inexplicably driving a '40s convertible - yet never with the top down for some reason - the film was reset in the swinging '70s when it was made & only a few plot elements vaguely connected the film to the original Raymond Chandler novel at all. In one ludicrous scene, the villain - to impress Marlowe with how vicious he is - smashes his own girlfriend in the face with a coke bottle. The bottle shatters, badly cutting her face. A coke bottle? Shatters on a human face? Yeah, right. But that's just the kind of film this was.

I know some consider this a classic, but I call it a pretentious piece of crap. Worse yet, despite elaborate sets & a cast of seemingly thousands, it's tedious. The music's inane, the choral bits downright mawkish, the dialog consistently bizarre & the acting stilted, with far too many long - way too long - significant looks exchanged by all concerned. (If they'd cut the eyeball intercourse by half, this boring film might have been half an hour shorter.)

And how can we gloss over the gaping crater in the storyline? In a brief flashback near the end, we're finally shown why Bronson's enigmatic harmonica player wants revenge - indeed, this is central to the whole dreary plot - but the flashback shows him completely surrounded by Fonda & his bad guys while being strung up by the neck. Guess we aren't supposed to ask how the hell he survived, eh?

Leone did his best work, his classic spaghetti westerns, when he was operating on a shoestring budget. It's like what happens to some musical bands who've produced one or two successful albums & can suddenly afford orchestral background. They get carried away with that kind of froth & frippery & lose track of their original sound. With this film, Leone's committed the cinematic equivalent.

I've come to really like BBC miniseries. Not that longer series don't have their charms, but with miniseries, three, four, maybe even six or eight episodes & the story's told. No need to keep watching year after year. The pithiness of it appeals to me.

Another aspect where the BBC beats American TV hands down is their realism. There's a certain gloss to American series that just doesn't ring true; everybody's just so unnaturally good-looking it's hard to forget they're actors. BBC actors, on the other hand, look like... well, anybody. They're just so natural, so normal looking, it's hard to remember they're actors. And isn't that the way it's supposed to be?

In this series, Kiri, a black child, is scheduled soon to be adopted by her white foster parents the Warners. Social worker Miriam however, in the interests of Kiri knowing her roots, approves an unsupervised visit with her birth mother & her grandfather Nate. But Kiri is abducted during the visit by her ex-con birth father Tobi & later murdered.

At first, it's naturally assumed Tobi murdered her. Then comes a red herring episode in which Si, the Warners' sensitive but shy & somewhat peculiar son seems almost certain to be the killer. The culprit finally turns out to be the last person you'd ever suspect, the mild-mannered foster father Jim, who'd been so unfailingly patient, considerate & downright decent throughout.

Ok, mystery solved. The fallout turns out to be far more riveting than the mystery tho.

Hounded by the media, the dedicated Miriam is forced out of her job - her vocation really, the job she's dedicated her life to - by a cowardly bureaucracy all too ready to throw a scapegoat to the wolves at the slightest whiff of scandal. Her diligence, her compassion, her wisdom, her years of experience thrown on the scrap heap because of a single highly publicized error in judgment. The sheer injustice is thrown into sharp relief when grief-stricken self-reproaching Miriam, her life now ruined, is recognized by a compete stranger. This woman walks straight up to her, punches her in the face, then self-righteously stands over her, shouting "A child! How could you?" as if Miriam, who only ever wanted to do right by Kiri, had murdered the child herself.

Kiri's father Tobi, the obvious suspect, is equally hounded - indeed tried & convicted - by the media. He has a history of violence & he's black: clearly guilty. His father Nate (a fine understated performance by Paapa Essiedu) at first believes him guilty & sets out to track him down. When Tobi convinces him he's innocent, Nate arranges with the police for Tobi to turn himself in. All he asks is a chance for Tobi to shower, change clothes & have a decent meal at home before doing so. Just as they're about to leave for the police station tho, the police renege on the agreement, burst in & arrest Tobi as a fugitive instead.

The foster mother Alice, having come to believe her son Si is the real killer, gives damning false evidence against Tobi in order to protect Si. Si, the foster brother who genuinely loved Kiri, who was most distraught at her death, knows Alice is lying & correctly deduces why. Si's the one who figures out his dad killed her.

He confronts Jim with a choice: Admit it now & it goes no further; deny it & he'll take his suspicions not to the police but - far worse - to his mother. Jim breaks down & confesses. He'd seen the girl as "new glue" to hold his failing marriage together. When she rejected the impending adoption to run off with her birth father instead, he killed her in a fit of rage.

Si then explains his rationale for keeping Jim's guilty secret: Shaken & appalled by the public scrutiny his family has already endured, this shy sensitive boy can all too easily imagine becoming notorious as the son of "the monster family" whose dad murdered poor little Kiri. To avoid that, he'll let an innocent man to go to prison. He's a criminal anyway, isn't he? What does it matter? And this is the saddest most shocking part of all. Si isn't a bad kid, quite the opposite. Throughout, he's shown love & concern for his family, including Kiri, but his desperate need for at least the façade of white middle class respectability, no matter how sham, takes precedence over an unknown black man's innocence.

What a truly horrible ending! But that brings us back to the realism of the BBC. No happy ending here. No justice. Anywhere in the white-dominated world, a black man, innocent or not, is five times more likely to be convicted of a crime than a white man & this series doesn't flinch from this ugly reality.

Florida Project is another one of those films whose trailers concentrate deceptively on the upbeat scenes to create a false impression of carefree exuberance. The real story is a dreary two-hour slice of life in the low-end motels of Orlando's Disney World fringe, where even the gun shop professes a dubious Disney tie-in. The only saving grace - tho not quite enough to save the day - is an excellent performance by Willem Dafoe as Bobby, the long-suffering goodhearted manager of the run-down motel that serves as the locus of the film.

The lead character, precocious six-year-old Moonee (Brooklyn Prince), is frequently adorable, but two hours of her & her friends' shrill hyperactivity is wearing at best. In true cinéma verité style, the dialog is rapid & often mumbled, making it hard to follow what little "plot" there may be. Moonee's mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) just misses being likable. She clearly loves her daughter & we can't help sympathizing with her straitened circumstances, just a poor foolish girl trying to make her way as best she can. Yet her inability to prevent her foul mouth from running away with her at the slightest provocation tends to erode even the most obstinate sympathy. Her efforts to scam a living & her occasional forays into prostitution - bringing a John home while Moonee is consigned to a long bath in the same motel room - tend to confirm the authorities' conclusion that she really isn't a fit mother despite her best intentions.

Thru most of the film, we witness Moonee's joie de vivre, her laughter, her impudence, but it isn't till the authorities come to take her into foster care that we see her truly angry. She manages to elude them & flees to her best friend's house & here for the first time we see her in tears. Her friend is so moved by her anguish that - without even needing to know what the trouble is - she grabs Moonee's hand & the two children run away together. To Disney World, no less. Significant symbolism here, I guess eh? The innocence of youth seeking refuge in the beguiling illusion of a glitzy hyper-marketed amusement park. Just another of those unresolved endings so common in films nowadays. Happily ever after, the end? Yeah, right.

I've recently noticed a disturbing trend in which movie trailers create what I think is a deliberately misleading impression of the movies they're supposed to illustrate. I've been sucked into watching several turkeys because their trailers were so enticing. The trailer for Beatriz at Dinner gives the impression of a modern-day drawing-room comedy: Plainspoken working-class Mexican woman (Salma Hayek) violates social norms at an upper-crust Anglo dinner party by taking a rich suave robber-baron (John Lithgow) bluntly to task for his nefarious societal & environmental depredations. Every comedic moment in the film is crowded into the trailer, making it seem like a much merrier movie than it turns out to be.

Naturally, the trailer doesn't show the irrelevant opening & closing scenes of a woman, presumably Beatriz, paddling a boat. Artistically cryptic, symbolically significant no doubt, but really... it comes across pretentious rather than portentous. That's a minor quibble, but to me it's a subtle warning sign.

The trailer doesn't show anything of Beatriz' brooding sorrow, despair or homicidal urges. Nor does it show her leaving long teary answering-machine messages for someone or other she evidently misses desperately — someone we soon come to suspect may no longer be alive, tho we'll never find out. So many things are hinted at in this film, but just left hanging & Hayek's powerful acting ends up wasted on a two-dimensional character who's never quite fleshed out.

Certainly nothing in the trailer leads you to expect the unhappy ending. Or is it?? Like so much of this film, that too is left to the viewer's interpretation. Given so little background or rationale, I'd say it's too shallow to be worth pondering. Movies that resort to ambiguous endings in hopes of pleasing — or maybe bamboozling? — everyone just end up falling between two chairs.

Maybe it's not as bad a film as I'm making it out to be, but it certainly isn't the film the trailer makes it out to be. And that was the film I actually wanted to see.

I found myself reluctant ever to start watching a series with such a title. I basically despise organizations like the CIA, Homeland Security & the like that operate in deepest obscurity, often way outside the law — let alone the bounds of human decency. Admittedly, this show does glorify the CIA to a certain extent, the basic premise being that the CIA is at least somewhat more ethical than the rest of the terrorists. This, of course, ignores the chicken-&-egg question of whether international terrorism could ever have reached such appalling magnitude were it not for the provocative, often despicable, actions of the CIA, the school of the Americas, Air America & their ilk.

That said, I have to admit this series doesn't gloss over the pervasive moral ambiguity that surrounds the day-to-day operations of this vast secret government. Nor does it shy away from depicting the incompetence, the internal power-jockeying & backstabbing, the questionable compromises with loathsome governments & indefensible transactions with vile individuals that go with the territory. Nor does it depict "the other side" in simplistic black & white terms either.

The well-rounded characters & horrendously complex situations are intriguing (pun originally unintended):

Bipolar Carrie struggles to keep herself together without losing the edge her craziness sometimes lends her when she goes off her meds. Her attempts to break with the CIA & lead a normal life are continually thwarted by her loyalty to old comrades & her innate inability to stand down in the face of imminent terrorist threats.

Carrie's stalwart mentor, Saul, strives to preserve his integrity as he rises within the organization & has to cope with the ever more delusive schemes & convoluted justifications of politicos & bureaucrats vastly distanced from the gritty, often bloody, experience of agents in the field.

Quinn, the professional assassin, struggles to maintain not only his own sense of morality but his basic human decency while frequently committing murder on command.

Brody, the conflicted marine POW, turned by years of torture & brainwashing, tries faithfully to serve his jihadi masters while continually confronted with the suffering he's wreaking on his loving wife & children, not to mention the nation he still holds dear in his heart of hearts.

For characters & plot twists like this, I'm willing to muster the requisite suspension of disbelief. It's a damn good show.

I really enjoyed Legend towards the beginning — lots of great local color & interesting characters & the fight at the Pig & Whistle is one of the jolliest I've ever seen. Only Ronnie Kray could have been maniacal enough to convince a whole bar full of hard cases intent on serious mischief that: a) he'd brought along two pistols to what he reckoned to be a shootout, b) he'd get so infuriated that the other side was armed with nothing more than iron pipes & the like & c) he'd forget about his twin brother & stalk off in sheer indignation.

It was far less enjoyable, tho no less brilliant, later on when it all turned dark & nasty. I'm sure it must have felt much like that to the Krays too, watching their lives spin out of control.

Tom Hardy did a brilliant job portraying both twins; I had to keep reminding myself this was the same actor, all the while marveling at his versatility. His characterization of violently schizoid Ronnie was admirably nuanced. Making him hateful would have been so so easy, but half the time Hardy had you feeling sorry for the poor daft bugger. Brilliant. The very best of the Kray films, I calls it.

This series started out pretty decently, with generous lashings of sex & nudity & some of the most imaginative CG killing & maiming you'll ever witness, but it also had a lot of vividly well-rounded characters! Sadly, after the first season the lead actor, Andy Whitfield, suddenly died & had to be replaced by Liam McIntyre, an actor not quite as intense, tho not for want of trying. (The continual strain of trying to live up to Whitfield's charisma probably contributed to McIntyre's slightly wooden Spartacus. He did what he could, but stepping into a lead role already popularized by someone else has got to be a hard row to hoe no matter what & Whitfield was a hard act to follow.) To make matters worse, Batiatus (the brilliant John Hannah), the almost likable rogue who owns the lutus, gets killed off at the end of the first season. As do Batiatus' rival lanista Solonius (excellently played by Craig Walsh-Wrightson) & Spartacus' bumbling friend Varro (Jai Courtney). But what the hey, we still have plenty of great characters left.

By end of the second season tho, the remaining characters portrayed with any real depth — the conniving Assyrian Ashur (Nick E Tarabay), Batiatus' scheming wife Lucretia (Lucy Lawless), her snooty airhead frenemy Ilythia (Viva Bianca) & even the indomitably dignified Oenameaus (Peter Mensah) all get whacked too.

Tho the script tries to compensate with lots of bombast, the surviving characters become increasingly shallow & the third season rapidly degenerates into a lot of verbal & physical wrangling interspersed with wooden love scenes & otherwise unrelenting slash & bash action. No matter how brilliantly choreographed, after two seasons, all this fighting stuff gets pretty tedious. Two new characters do manage to somewhat enliven the third season tho: Attius (Cohen Holloway), the venal but plainspoken Roman blacksmith who casts his lot with the rebels but — unfortunately — lasts only two episodes & Laeta (Anna Hutchison), the public-spirited young Roman matron who ends up a slave herself. Nevertheless, by the end of the final ep, I was impatient for the mortally wounded Spartacus to just hurry up & finish dying so the series could finally be over.

Garde à Vue is a sound police procedural & Lino Ventura, whether cop or criminal, is always reliable. His Inspecteur Gallien was every bit as good as I'd expected & Michel Serreault was quite adept as the suspect Martinaud too. Romy Schneider as his wife, however, seemed stiff & wooden - tho that could have been intentional.

That said, Gallien was the only one whose behavior seemed at all realistic. All other human interactions - including those of the other cop, Belmont - seem peculiar if not bizarre. Even Martinaud, tho well acted, seems forced & not quite lifelike.

The plot-line leads nowhere & parachuting in the real killer for a surprise ending like that strikes me as cheesy. What kind of moron reports his car stolen, knowing he'd left a murdered child's corpse in his trunk? I can't recall Schneider's reasons for living down the hall from her estranged husband rather than getting a divorce, but her suicide struck me as more bathetic than dramatic.

I know, I know, criminals can be exceedingly stupid, many cases end up being solved by sheer fluke & people do inexplicable things. Gallien aside tho, everything these people do or say strikes me as surreal. Maybe it's supposed to? I dunno. I know this film is considered a classic; I just wish I could say I enjoyed it.

Elysium's pretty simplistic. The ruling elite have built themselves a perfect environment on Elysium, a space station orbiting Earth, & left the rest of mankind to their polluted overpopulated fate. Fatally irradiated in an industrial accident, Matt Damon joins a band plotting to invade Elysium, where advanced technology can cure any ailment short of death itself. Eventually concluding that mankind's needs take precedence over his personal salvation tho, he sacrifices his life to upload a program that makes all citizens of earth eligible for the same prerogatives as the elite citizens of Elysium.

All very soul-satisfying, the filthy rich get a well-deserved screwing & equality for all is suddenly attained at the flip of a switch. Nice sentiment, but ah.... How does eliminating death by disease or injury so everybody can live pretty much forever help a population that's already destroying its own planet thru sheer weight of numbers?

Run Summary: Don't see obstacles, see opportunities.

Run is primarily a visual homage to parkour, a sort of non-combative martial art developed in the '80s from military obstacle course training. It's all about getting from point A to point B, using nothing but your unassisted body — running, climbing, swinging, vaulting, jumping, rolling & scrabbling on all fours. Nowadays, parkour seems to include very acrobatic front, back & side flips as well, making it quite spectacular to see. Downright jaw-dropping to watch someone use sheer momentum to run along the side of a vertical wall or scramble up meager handholds on the walls of two close-set buildings by springing with seeming ease from one building to another.

Daniel, the protagonist, attends high school by day, but by night he's an accomplished thief who uses parkour to escape from the cops. His father's a former gangster who's been on the run from his ex-boss ever since a very personal falling out many years ago, so he & Daniel never stay long in any one locality & have prearranged escape plans always in place. When they have to move on yet again to keep from getting known, the son makes friends with a crew of parkour enthusiasts at his new high school & wants to stay.

(One false note here when Daniel tells his new friends he learned his skills all by himself & didn't even know there was a name for it. In this Internet age, he never heard of parkour? Aw, c'mon now.)

When Daniel's father & also his new girlfriend are captured by the baddies, it's up to Daniel & his new friends to save them. Not a great movie, plot line pretty predictable, but an entertaining visual introduction to all you ever wanted to know — & then some — about parkour.

When I heard they'd made a movie based on Cogan's Trade, I was eager to see it even tho the cockamamie title put me off. I consider Friends of Eddie Coyle to be one of the all-time classic gangster films & always wondered why none of George V Higgins' other crime novels had ever made it to film. Most of Higgins' plot exposition emerges thru dialog anyhow, so his books seem ready-made for film.

Killing Them Softly turned out to be not quite in the same league as Eddie Coyle, but it might have been if they hadn't tried to fix what wasn't broken. Admittedly, a large part of my dissatisfaction with many a movie stems from knowing the books they're based on. Having just re-read Cogan's Trade for maybe the 6th time or so, I knew the story inside out. That's always a problem when they base a movie on one of your favorite books: you've built up clear images of each character & setting in your mind. You also know what's coming next, which can rob the action of considerable impact. Still, if the book's good, you want to savor it on film.

This was well cast & acted, with Brad Pitt as hit-man/fixer Jackie Cogan, James Gandolfini as a subcontracted killer reluctant to ply his trade & Vincent Curatola in a small but pithy part as the conniving Johnny Amato. Higgins' original 1974 novel was transposed to the Obama era, which certainly makes sense from a producer's standpoint — you save money not shelling out for '70s cars or masking anachronistic street scenery — & maybe that wasn't such a bad thing. Not what I would have preferred, but the story wasn't specifically tied into the '70s, so yeah, OK. And I do have to admit those voice-overs of Obama justifying the infamous Wall Street bailout added a nice touch of irony.

My real gripe, what really spoils it for me, is that absolutely extraneous monologue in the bar at the end. Up till then, they'd stuck pretty close to the original & made a pretty decent movie out of it. But then they have Cogan react to a televised Obama speech by spouting off about Thomas Jefferson being a slave-owner & America being not a country but a business. Not that I disagree with the political sentiment expressed, but it just doesn't belong, it seems to have just parachuted in out of nowhere.

Presumably they tacked this on in a gratuitous attempt to make the movie somehow more relevant for today's audiences, but it adds nothing to the story & today's relevance very quickly becomes yesterday's obscurity anyhow. Higgins' real mastery was always in the dialog, but some utterly deluded hack with a political axe to grind thought he could improve on Higgins. The sad part is that those in charge — who should have known better — let him try.

In real life, Hugh Glass was mauled by a grizzly & left for dead, but managed to drag himself back to a frontier outpost. The cinematic handling of the story in Revenant, however, is straight out of Cormac McCarthy: heavy-handed with funereal music & gray-scale tones throughout, creating an overall impression that the sun rarely ever shone in those mountains in those times. Just watching it becomes a test of endurance. Cold, colorless, dismal, stark, bleak, brutal, dispiriting & ultimately pointless. Perhaps that was how these men actually lived their lives? Maybe that's the point? If there is one?

At the end of the film, we're left not even knowing whether Glass, after exacting vengeance on the man who killed his son, lives or dies himself. Or perhaps that doesn't matter? Perhaps none of it matters? Ptui! Worst film I've watched since Deadman.