Credit: Netflix

Are you also one of those people who remembers The Revenant mainly as the film that finally got Leonardo DiCaprio his Oscar? Don’t worry, nobody’s blaming anybody. After years of nominations and everyone rooting for the Titanic star, that win became almost inseparable from the film.

However, reducing The Revenant to Leo’s long-awaited award would be unfair to what a brute of a film Alejandro G Iñárritu actually made. The film came out in 2015, and it still feels like yesterday. Can you believe it?

The Revenant follows Glass, a frontiersman travelling with a fur-trapping expedition in 1823. Then comes that bear attack (yes, the one everybody remembers), which leaves him mauled beyond recognition. The guy’s barely alive, for crying out loud.

Now, the group can’t carry him through the wild, and then we have Tom Hardy as John Fitzgerald, who is also among those left behind with him. Fitzgerald soon decides Glass is a lost cause…. Except Glass does not die. Against every reasonable expectation, he begins dragging himself across the wild, with revenge giving him something to crawl towards.

The screenplay of the film comes from Michael Punke’s novel about the real Hugh Glass, though Iñárritu and co-writer Mark L Smith reshaped plenty of the history for dramatic purposes. So no, technically you are not watching a documentary but a survival western that takes a famous frontier legend as a foreground and adds a sprinkle of drama to it.

DiCaprio was fully committed to the role that got him the Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’. He went into freezing water during production and famously ate raw bison liver for a scene despite being a vegetarian at the time. Now, that may sound like one of those actor stories that grows taller with every retelling, but DiCaprio himself discussed doing it.

Now, if the film looks as though everybody involved had an absolutely miserable time making it, well, there is a reason. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki went nuts on the use of natural light, and that left the crew with limited shooting windows and even smaller room for error.

And that’s the reason he won his third consecutive cinematography Oscar for the film after Gravity and Birdman. It’s magnificent. That visual grammar does half the storytelling, and you can’t disagree.

So, sure, revisit The Revenant this weekend because it is more than just the film that finally put an Oscar in DiCaprio’s hands. But once it starts, forget everything and try to observe those tiny details. Watch how small the characters become whenever the perilous wild enters the frame.

Sure, the trophy made the headlines, but the film itself is what still has teeth.