In brief, The Revenant is what The Hateful Eight promised to be: the toughest Western since True Grit, complete with awe-inducing snowscapes; it's dazzling to see such magnificent desolation prevail in a crowded world. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inárritu based The Revenant on the legend of Hugh Glass, previously told in 1971's Man in the Wilderness, with Richard Harris commencing his series of frontier-ordeal movies.
Inárritu sets his violent epic in the midst of the fur trade on the upper Missouri River in the 1820s—the result of a bubble in the price of beaver hides. Rival groups of Europeans denude the forest of its creatures, while holding off the understandably furious Arikara Indians. Scouting for a party of trappers, Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is mauled by a bear and left for dead by his companions. Despite severe wounds and a broken leg, Glass fights his way back to civilization, in this version to confront the man—Fitzgerald (played by the ever-impressive Tom Hardy)—who abandoned him.