10 films to watch before you see The Revenant

While watch­ing The Revenant, our mind was free-asso­ci­at­ing like mad. Even though this oper­at­ic sur­vival pic­ture is very much its own thing, we couldn’t help but draw all kinds of links with movies that it resem­bled in some strange way or anoth­er. Here are 10 films to check out before brav­ing Ale­jan­dro González Iñárritu’s bruis­ing epic.

Wern­er Herzog’s voy­age into the heart of dark­ness sees Klaus Kinski’s mad-eyed offi­cer usurp a mis­sion down the Ama­zon riv­er in search of El Dora­do. The film’s depic­tion of the bru­tal clash between man and nature is some­thing that Her­zog returned to over and over, that essen­tial incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty remain­ing at the core of his project. And as a movie that’s about sheer force of will and men choos­ing not to accept the lim­its of their phys­i­cal being, it’s makes for the ulti­mate pre-Revenant apéritif.

Ter­rence Mal­ick had not yet begun his col­lab­o­ra­tion with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Emmanuel ​“Chi­vo” Lubez­ki – who once more whisks his visu­al alche­my in The Revenant – but his work with John Toll on 1998’s The Thin Red Line antic­i­pates his shift into impres­sion­is­tic splen­dour. The way the cam­era moves across the land­scape, embed­ding itself along with the human char­ac­ters, recalls the man­ner in which Mal­ick plants the view­er on the ver­dant hill­sides of Guadal­canal island dur­ing World War Two.

This is a film which is not afraid of get­ting its hands dirty. Or its arms, legs, face… the whole body to be hon­est. The all-con­sum­ing filth on show in Alek­sei German’s over­whelm­ing, sense-bat­ter­ing swan song has been recre­at­ed (to an extent) in The Revenant, with sel­dom a moment that a char­ac­ter isn’t lung­ing into a bog, get­ting splat­tered in mud, falling into a steam of forced to hole up in a dank cave. You watch this movie and think, there’s no way that’s CG dis­tress­ing or brown make-up. That’s the real deal.

At its core, The Revenant is a down-home revenge movie, see­ing Leonar­do DiCaprio’s Hugh Glass going to the most extreme lengths imag­in­able – defy­ing nature, in fact – to make anoth­er man pay for his man­i­fold sins. Though a movie like Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga cap­tures the mechan­ics of revenge in a vari­ety of nov­el, cine-lit­er­ate ways, Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film offers a baroque pre­cur­sor to Iñárritu’s gru­elling epic. But where the head-wound of choice here is the scalp­ing, Park’s film gives us blunt force trau­ma to the skull. With hammers.

Where Hugh Glass is a char­ac­ter who has to claw his way up from below zero to attain his just deserts, The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jor­dan Belfort lives a lux­u­ri­ous life of plen­ty. Beyond the fact that both char­ac­ters are played by Leonar­do DiCaprio, there are scenes in each film which are near iden­ti­cal in exe­cu­tion and nar­ra­tive pur­pose. In WoWS, it’s the moment where Belfort ingests a batch of dou­ble-strength quaaludes and los­es all con­trol of his motor func­tions, reduc­ing him to a flap­ping mulch of limbs and gurn­ing facial expres­sions. The mir­ror­ing sequence in The Revenant is not played for laughs, but when you see it, you’ll see the link straight away.

The scene in Steven Spielberg’s Juras­sic Park where the T‑Rex breaks free from its de-elec­tri­fied pen and starts its scav­enger hunt for human prey is one of those sem­i­nal moments which, when you first saw it, the like­li­hood is you were sat they prey­ing for it to be over. Nin­com­poop blog­gers have have start­ed a rumour that The Revenant con­tains a scene in which DiCaprio’s char­ac­ter is ​“raped” by a griz­zly bear. By all means take this knowl­edge in with you and attempt to test it as a the­o­ry, but it won’t shield you from the sheer pro­longed hor­ror of see­ing a human being slashed to ribbons.

For his 1976 film Meat, mas­ter doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er Fred­er­ick Wise­man head­ed to the Mon­fort Meat Pack­ing Com­pa­ny in Gree­ley, Col­orado to train his cam­era on a vari­ety of ani­mal species being torn to pieces with all man­ner of indus­tri­al devices. It’s fair to say that the sight of splayed entrails and innards will have to be more than just accept­able to the poten­tial view­er of The Revenant.

We’ve thrown John Lan­dis’ Dick­en­sian share trad­ing com­e­dy into the mix on two fronts: first, as an exam­ple of a long-game revenge mis­sion which involves risk­ing life and limb for suc­cess. And sec­ond, as a film in which a char­ac­ter is seen gnaw­ing on a raw fish. At a low ebb, Dan Aykroyd’s Louis Winthor­pe III dons a soiled San­ta cos­tume and breaks into a par­ty being host­ed by his for­mer pay­mas­ters, the Duke broth­ers. Decid­ing not to kill any­one with the revolver he’s pack­ing, he instead hoards an giant batch smoked salmon in his slacks, chew­ing on it with obscene rel­ish while sat on a bus.

Tom Greene’s Fred­dy Got Fin­gered is what the cool kids of film crit­i­cism call a ​“film mau­dit” – despised as a team sport when it was released, but with the gift of hind­sight, a true, sub­ver­sive one-off. Writ­ten, direct­ed by and star­ring the erst­while com­ic and chat-show host, it sees a wannabe car­toon­ist head­ing off on a voy­age of self-dis­cov­ery which takes in home­made skate-ramps, imper­son­at­ing a mid­wife, com­e­dy child abuse, and at one point, Green envelop­ing him­self with­in the corpse of a deer. Now, we’re not say­ing that Ale­jan­dro González Iñár­ritu is a Fred­dy Got Fin­gered fan, but…

We asso­ciate the clas­sic west­ern with arid planes, blis­ter­ing heat and panoram­ic blue skies, but Andre de Toth’s 1959 film is one of the great cin­e­mat­ic inver­sions of this ide­al. Much like The Revenant, we see arche­typ­al west­ern char­ac­ters hav­ing to con­tend with nature at its most unfor­giv­ing, as seen here in the des­o­late burg of Bit­ters, Wyoming. Robert Ryan plays scowl­ing hard­man Blaise out to get one over on a band of bank rob­bers tak­ing refuge in town, and direc­tor de Toth is sure to place their vio­lent dis­pute against a gap­ing abyss of pearly white snow.

The Revenant is released 15 Jan­u­ary. Read our review.