Now that he’s been branded with the scarlet “PF”, Alejandro González Iñárritu has seemingly made it his mission to make it up to those he alienated with his last, uh, four films or so with his newest effort, The Revenant. Sure, he has a funny way of showing it, given the variety of horror stories that came from the shooting of the film (and an amazing-sounding incident involving him getting choked out by Tom Hardy, which he then immortalized in a t-shirt that Tom Hardy was seen wearing), but the first trailer, with its sparse dialogue, insanely beautiful imagery, and precise editing, shut a lot of people up, and now here comes the second trailer to convert a few more folks to The Church of the Holy Pretentious Fraud.
A lot of the teaser makes it into this full trailer, with the additions mainly being clarifications of what happened to poor Leonardo DiCaprio (in short, attacked by a bear, left for dead by his supposed buddies, including Tom Hardy, dead son in there too) that got him to want to perform this revenge business in the first place. There’s still not much dialogue at all (and from the sounds of it, Leo won’t get too many more lines in the finished film than he gets in this trailer), which is likely a selling point for those who weren’t impressed by the script of Birdman. The credits block at the end reveals something that was previously unknown, and that was that Ryuichi Sakamoto (the Oscar-winning composer/actor who’s scored films for the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci and Brian De Palma) will be scoring the film, which is great news for a certain subsection of film fans. But, of course, the big point of interest is the cinematography, and how crazypants amazing it looks. This is González Iñárritu’s second feature collaboration (they previously did the wonderful Nike ad “Write the Future” together) with half of America’s favorite prankster duo, Emmanuel Lubezki, and his work here appears to be halfway between the lyricism and beautiful vistas of his work with Terrence Malick and the “you-are-there” urgency of his work on Children of Men. There is a much better-than-average chance that he’ll be walking away with his third straight Best Cinematography Oscar for it, which may finally make up for the Academy shitting the bed and not giving an Oscar to him for The Tree of Life. And maybe this will be Leo’s year too, unless he and the bear go head-to-head in the Best Actor category, in which case better luck next year, Leo. Oh, and here’s that photo of Tom Hardy wearing that shirt I was talking about earlier.
