I won't be seeing The Revenant.
I don't care that I "should" see it because Leonardo DiCaprio is going to win Best Actor for this movie. He's not winning for this movie exactly, by the way. He's winning because he gave very good performances in several other movies, and no one else is really a threat in this category this year (no offense, Eddie Redmayne, but you are no Tom Hanks; you are not the definition of the American Sweetheart, and nobody thinks you're worthy of getting two back-to-back Oscars--even if you are the politically correct choice this year).
Leo isn't the reason I won't see The Revenant.
Neither is Tom Hardy, who has been publicly called out on treating those who work for him like dirt. No, I'm not doing this just because Tom Hardy is in it--I don't dislike him enough to avoid him, and I do think he is a good actor.
I won't see the movie because Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu endangered the lives of his crew repeatedly while making this movie so that it could be within his "vision".
I won't see the movie because seeing it is, in some way, condoning that kind of behavior.
Also, it would mean that I am somehow supporting a man who is (and I do apologize; I have no other terminology for it) a blight on the human condition.
In other words, an asshole.
I am not overstating it when I said that Inarritu endangered the lives of his crew. He also endangered the lives of some of the extras by potentially freezing them to death in wetsuits that had broken. It's a wonder these people didn't die.
IATSE, the labor union for film workers (also theater and TV) was called to the set three times after complaints kept piling up about the unsafe working conditions. The main production company (there are five attached to the film) stated that these conditions were not unsafe (from the safety of their Hollywood offices, I might add--the one producer that did go up there made things worse with Inarritu and caused a significant delay).
About all of this, Inarritu has said the following:
"When you see the film, you will see the scale of it," promises Inarritu. "And you will say, 'Wow.'"
I absolutely refuse to give that kind of ego credence to continue to push the limits just because this man is, in his own words, "an artiste". So much of what he wanted to create did not have to occur in the dead of winter in Alberta, CA. (Which is another point--these IATSE crew members were indigenous to the area, most of them. They know what it's like to deal with such conditions. And they complained--which is exactly like someone in Syracuse complaining about snow conditions. It had to be BEYOND THE PALE for them to say, "Whoa, stop, we shouldn't be doing this.")
It was so bad that, apparently, Tom Hardy yelled at Inarritu about the conditions and what he, Hardy, was asked to do while being significantly injured from filming Mad Max. Inarritu wouldn't budge--what Hardy wanted to have done was nothing special, but having a safety apparatus that would have to then be digitally erased was not part of his "vision", and therefore Inarritu refused--so Hardy decked him, and with a single punch laid him out flat.
Egos are nothing new in Hollywood--thanks for playing, Michael Bay, James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, John Frankenheimer--but there are egos and then there is idiocy all in the name of someone's "vision" that some idiots down there in H'wood decided to fund to the tune of $135 million dollars. I have a vision that children don't go hungry in this country, and I don't see New Regency Cinema shelling out for my special vision. Then again, I'm not an "artiste" by their standards.
Maybe I'm just not an asshole.
So no, thank you, I'll take a pass.
P.S. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, aka the governing body behind the Oscars, really messed up this year by not including Straight Outta Compton for Best Picture--nobody would expect it to win in a year when Spotlight was made, honestly, but for crying out loud you include a cultural touchstone like that (same for the new Star Wars, really). They messed up for not including Ridley Scott for Best Director, Michael B. Jordan for Creed, and most of all not including The Peanuts Movie for Best Animated Feature.
Now I want popcorn.
