Leonardo DiCaprio (Twentieth Century Fox)

A revenant is one returned from the dead. The Revenant is an epic story about human resilience and revenge. Shot with natural light but featuring a central and not entirely convincing CGI attacker, the new film from director Alejandro G, Iñárritu is an adventure that unspools at a sometimes glacial pace. It’s inspired by a true story that one suspects is more intriguing than this retelling. And its revenge is served, literally, cold.

It’s a snowy winter in 1823. Fur trapper Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is part of a hunting party on the run from an attacking Arikara tribe. The party’s escape through treacherous, unsettled territory is further hampered when Glass is viciously attacked by a bear (an incident which some have erroneously reported as a rape scene). After the party splits up to better navigate the snowy mountain landscape, Glass is left under the watch of two young men, his Pawnee son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck) and wet-behind-the-ears Bridger (Will Poulter). Unfortunately, they’re also left with untrustworthy trapper John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy).

Glass’ injuries are so massive that Fitzgerald decides to defy orders from Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) and leave Glass behind for dead, but Glass manages to survive. Will he have his revenge?

Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity, Birdman) is a helluva cameraman, staying with these characters through cold and snowy conditions that the entire cast and crew had to endure. But he uses an extremely wide-angle lens that can be dizzying when the camera moves, and that’s hard to compose for. The wide angle puts Glass and his nemesis in the expanses of a bitter landscape, but the lenses are less well-suited for crucial scenes that would have benefited from an action director. Sure, the bear mauling is a brutal attack, but the furry creature doesn’t seem real enough, especially in the context of a film that otherwise makes good use of natural light. And a climactic human battle is set up with little tension, which may be partly due to the wide-angle but can mostly be blamed on a director who really isn’t meant for action.

The film is an impressive technical accomplishment; the filmmakers created an avalanche not with special effects but by means of a well-timed explosive charge. (Yay the purity of nature!) DiCaprio gives his whole body to this performance; the attack leaves him unable to speak, and the film works best in its silent tension. Despite its two-and-a-half hour running time, this isn’t a boring movie.

Still, I kept wishing the film had been made by another director: Quentin Tarantino for his bloody revenge (this would have been perfect material for the Ultra Panavision format he used for The Hateful Eight); Werner Herzog for his epic struggles of man and nature (he probably would have had DiCaprio attacked by a real bear). But a better approach to such material can be found in an unlikely source, still in area theaters.

Not long after seeing The Revenant, I watched The Good Dinosaur, a sometimes harrowing children’s film which I was surprised to find echoed many of this film’s plot points. Despite the lack of an iconic bear attack, the Pixar film is, if anything, more intense—probably too intense for small children and certain adults. See The Revenant on as big a screen as possible to take in its impressive visuals, but if you really want an adventure of survival at all costs, I swear The Good Dinosaur is the superior entertainment.

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The Revenant
Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Written by Mark L. Smith and Alejandro G. Iñárritu, based in part on the novel by Michael Punke
With Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Will Poulter
Rated R for strong frontier combat and violence including gory images, a sexual assault (no it’s not the bear), language and brief nudity
Running time 156 minutes
Opens today at a multiplex near you