The Revenant - Movie Review

The Revenant Review

The Revenant is the newest movie from the academy award winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who made the best picture winner from last year, Birdman. This movie does so many things right, it's hard to criticize it at all.

So The Revenant is about these westerners out south, and there is a conflict with the Indians, as the Americans are trying to collect pelts to sell. The movie is set in the 1820's, and looks like it's set around Missouri or Arkansas in the U.S., even though the movie was filmed in Argentina and Canada as well as a couple of locations in the United States. This movie has a couple of recognizable faces such as Leonardo Di Caprio(playing Hugh Glass), Tom Hardy (playing Fitzgerald), Will Poulter (From Narnia 3, The maze runner) and Domhnall Gleeson (From Ex Machina, Star Wars VII). I liked all the characters, and all of them felt like they had a role to play and were relevant for the sake of the story. This film originally started with around a $60 million budget, but by the time the movie had been wrapped, they had spent over $135 million, due to the director Iñárritu wanting natural light, minimal CGI and shooting the film in chronological order, basically shooting the movie in the sequence that the events in the movie happened. Iñárritu was apparently the Steve Jobs of a director, firing numerous people, and leading to a bunch of people quitting. Regardless of how the movie was produced, I can say that the obvious amount of effort put in to this movie pays off greatly.

The Revenant looks absolutely beautiful on screen, It's set during the winter, but it's only really dark on screen when the director wants it to be. There are a lot of amazing transitioning close ups and wide shots, and extreme wide shots in this movie when establishing a new scene. The cinematography in the movie was fantastic in this movie. The movie was filmed using only natural light, and it really immerses you in to the movie. There are parts of the movie that make you feel like you are there with Leonardo Di Caprio. There were a couple of action scenes in the movie that had great camerawork throughout. Iñárritu brought us Birdman, which mainly consists of one continuous shot, and there are some elements similar to that in this. When there is an action scene, It is usually in as minimal shots as possible, immersing you even farther in to movie. Violence was frequent in this movie, but the movie wasn't dominated by it, it was more there to show the grittiness of Hugh Glass' situation. Violence in this movie was very realistic, and some great scenes in the movie were so intense due to how brutal they were. The few action scenes in this movie were great, and I loved them so much I wished they lasted longer.

The characters were all great in this movie, and Leo Di Caprio killed it on screen. I'm really hoping that he wins the 'Best Actor' Oscar, because he gives an amazing performance in this film. In the film, Di Caprio didn't have many lines in the movie at all, and what little lines he had were mostly in another language. His character didn't need much dialogue anyway, since he expressed huge amounts of emotion without ever having to speak that often. His character is one that you can identify with, and one that you genuinely want to succeed. This movie is filled with detailed scenery, and the setting really sells the story. This film is more about survival and hope for man rather than a revenge flick, though there are a few elements like that. There is a lot of energy that comes with watching this movie, but it is more focused through survival than action, though there is some great action. This movie is extremely intense, but it does such a good job of being intense that actually physically and emotionally drained me. I felt absolutely exhausted after watching this movie. I felt emotionally drained because I was so involved with Hugh Glass' character, and I wanted him to prevail even though his intentions involved revenge. I was physically drained by how intense the movie was, and how peaceful some scenes were at the same time. The ending hit me really hard, and it reassured me how much I liked the film.

There was a lot of religious symbolism in this movie, which I thought was an abstract thing to do, but it still worked, and I had no problem with it. There were also a couple of occasional flashback sequences that were short and conveyed what they were supposed to without losing focus and dragging. I will say that the run time was a little too long for the story it was trying to tell. I think that the movie could still have successfully told the story it wanted to tell, and still cut back around half an hour of the run time. The story never lost focus, but it could have been just a little bit more tightly scripted if the movie was a little shorter. The musical score in this movie was great, and was used sparingly, which I liked to see. Some movies have a hard time with holding back the soundtrack, and force the theme on to you. I liked how the music was used in emotional moments and scenes that actually made sense.

In the end, The Revenant is an extremely artistic movie in the film world. It's well paced, extremely well shot and has great acting all around. This movie is intense and meticulously made, and it's obvious that a lot of dedication went in to making this movie. It is rare to come across a movie so well presented.

+ Great cinematography                 - Run time could have been cut back on a little bit

+ Action extremely well shot

+ Intense and draining

+Beautiful setting 

+ Score is good 

9.8/10 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 - Game Review

Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 Review

So Black Ops 3 is the latest game in the Call of Duty franchise, and proves that Treyarch is really great at rinse-and-repeat for most of their games. Seeing as the last Black Ops game was probably my favorite Call of Duty, it's a shame that this game doesn't deliver up to my bar I had at least set for it. This is definitely one of the least creative and innovative Call of Duty games, if not the least innovative First person Shooter I have ever played. I would say I'm disappointed, but as time progressed to the initial release of this game, I really had no excitement to this game. I apologize in advance for this review, as it's not going to be in depth as my other reviews, mainly because I have no enthusiasm for this game. As a reviewer, I have respect for the time put in to the production of this game. But this game does prove that first person shooters have all become formulaic, with the exception of a couple greats like Far Cry 3 and Fallout, games that provide places to explore and are actually halfway decently interesting.

This is going to be a very bare and unthorough review, which I don't usually ever want to do, but I just wanted to give my thoughts on the game based off of what I have already played. Based off of how little I have actually played the individual game modes, I can already say I'm not too impressed. You have the basic zombies mode, Campaign and multiplayer mode that was already in Black Ops 2. I played 30 minutes of the Campaign and actually felt no compellence to play any more, based off of how bland and cliché the plot and characters were so far. I could not actually force myself to play anymore of it. Next time I review a game I promise to be more thorough, but this time was too much. From what I've played, the storyline doesn't connect at all to the Black Ops 2 Campaign, which was at least bearable. This game also tries way too hard to be taken seriously. It tries to establish this Science fiction vibe where Robots are killing people and, oh no, The humans are getting annihilated. It's not like I have seen that in any other media platform in the entire universe.

 The characters are extremely boring and dull, which was an issue with Black Ops 2 as well. They were all so easy and cheap, like they were included starter kit for every cliché action movie or game. You have the character that has a grudge against another character but cooperate because their lives are at stake. You have a character that doesn't like taking orders and just so happens to get himself in to trouble. It was too vanilla, and I had absolutely no motivation to continue with it. And with the brief half hour I spent with it, The enemies were all too easy and the pathway to objectives was so linear, like there was no way to go except these tight spaces with occasional breathing room. It just wasn't what a good story in a first person shooter should do. After playing previous Call of Duty games, I could tell right from the start that this was going to be a waste of my time, and even the critic part of me didn't want to sacrifice my entertainment with my thoroughness.

The new Zombies mode in this game is only mediocre, it felt almost a little half-assed. I was disappointed to see that there was only 1 map for the zombies mode, and it was just one big city area with unlockable areas. You have to buy a bundle pack or something like that to get another map. So by forking over a couple more bucks, like 20% of the actual entire price of the game, I can make that mode slightly better. I feel kind of cheated by this, as all the big triple A titles and developers feel the need to include micro-transactions with games, which I absolutely despise. I mean, I can understand a DLC, or some extra added content that the developers made after the game was made because people wanted a little something else to satisfy their buyers. The key word in that sentence is 'after', because there are so many games out there right now that feel the need to release content after the game is released, usually over the course of a couple months, so that the game can try and still be relevant and say, "Hey, look at me, I'm still relevant because I have another pointless or meaningless thing added to me. All you have to do is pay some more money." This is a huge problem with me, because if there is some bundle pack with cool crap in it, like character skins or more missions or whatever, I will always have this tugging feeling in the back of my mind saying, 'I'm really not getting the full experience of this game that I could be getting.' This is a common tactic that developers will use to get the most amount brought in from all the attention that it gets. It's sad to see it becoming popular, because you will always never be getting the full experience that the developers could have brought unless you fork over a couple extra bucks. I don't want to pay money to better enjoy my game. Granted, there are some hidden secrets that I've heard about in this one map, but It's just not enough to make me want to go back to it.

After all that negative talk, let's talk some Pros. The game is presented very well. The effects on screen, such as rendering textures and other graphical issues are resolved from other Call of Duty games, where the game would take half a second to render the textures in the game as they were presented to you. There is a lot of customization options that you can add to your gun, or even your character. There are new types of people that you can play as called 'Specialists', which essentially all have different abilities that they can use and charge up in game. These Specialists were a nice shake up from other Call of Duty games.

Multiplayer mode was definitely the mode I enjoyed the most. There was so many different options for how you could customize your game with friends, to make some really fun matches. Granted, there were still a few things I was annoyed with. For one, all of the fun party modes from Black Ops 2 are gone, with the exception of Gun Game. Also, one thing that legitimately pissed me off was how hard it was to play with more then two people at once. On the back of the game box, it says 2 players offline, Which I didn't even know why was there, because I got it working before. They must have updated it so that you can't add more than two people, because I feel like a lunatic when I only did it once and can't do it again. I was so annoyed with how this game made it so hard to play with a group of friends.

Where credit is due, Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 will bring a couple of good times if you are unfamiliar with the franchise, or if this is your fist Call of Duty game. I find it concerning the lack of innovation in these triple A titles, like all they care about is the profit this game will make. It is always disheartening to a critic, or viewer of reviewer when a bad product of media gets a lot of money and more praise than deserved, or not a lot of money at all when it was fantastic. I feel like this game will fall in to the first category, with a lot of fanboys of the franchise willingly handing over huge amounts of money to buy all these cool bundle packs and crap. This game will bring you some good times like I said, but it feels rinse and repeat with all the COD games being cranked out on a schedule, and frankly, a little frustrating.

+ Multiplayer will bring some good times                  - Zombies mode feels lazily made
+ Good to start with if new to franchise                      - Borrowed and cliché Campaign
                                                                                     - All these pointless micro-transactions
5.5/10