Okay, you have to get off the my criticism is better than your criticism thing. No, I don't write 5,000 word essays on everything I see, but I am not especially reductive either. Plus when I am, I am more than willing to admit it and further the conversation. The thing about this article is it goes a long way to tell you that Hulk was not immersed in The Revenant, but it is beautiful so he can see why people are. I am fine with his criticisms actually. I can certainly see The Revenant leaving some one cold. Where The Sean says bullsh!t is when the hyperbole kicks in for Mad Max. Again, I understand why people love this movie so much but to use at as a case against The Revenant is misrepresenting what Mad Max is. To say the characters are more well defined is weak. There isn't a character in The Revenant that doesn't have clear motivations. If The Hulk loved The Revenant he could have easily kept the same adjectives in this piece and flip flopped the movie title and director names. It is a long essay but that doesn't mean it isn't a puff piece. No, I'm not going to write an equally long essay to say why I think he is wrong. If that's what your going to come back with, save it. Because that becomes as reductive as "that movie was boring".
Yeah, but the whole reason that Hulk compared
Mad Max against
The Revenant in the first place is to examine the importance of cinematic language and how a film's visuals are used to communicate with the audience, especially when it comes to the development of a story and its characters. In this regard, he argues that
Mad Max is more effective at doing it in a way that does not suggest that he is "misrepresenting" it (which seems like a loaded and presumptuous word anyway, as if there is only one "right" way to treat
Mad Max and any other interpretation is suspect). Sure, it's a whizz-bang action sci-fi movie, but the ways in which it's well-made go above just simply setting up explosive car chases. To say the characters in
Mad Max are 'more well-defined" is not supposed to imply that the characters in
The Revenant don't have clearly-defined motivations, but that there is more to a character than just a motivation in a vacuum, especially when that particular character's motivation is challenged throughout the film (which arguably happens to Glass, but is also present in Max, Furiosa, and Nux at least). This is even illustrated in the article by the scene where Max and Furiosa first meet and almost immediately get into a no-holds-barred fist-fight, which has a palpable tension to it precisely because we know that they both have understandable (even sympathetic) motivations for fighting each other so there is some investment in seeing who wins or even if anyone gets hurt. At the very least, there's more going on with this article than can be altered with a mere word-replacement. Still, I guess if you're willing to admit that you're being reductive, then it certainly makes it easier to take your arguments with a grain of salt.
On a totally unrelated note, is there anyone who actually has a suggestion for "most overrated film of 2015" that isn't
The Revenant or
Mad Max?
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