I recently came across the story of Glass briefly when reading TC Boyles "The Harder They Come", and since this book increased my already big fondness for pioneer or realistic wild west settings, I was looking forward eagerly for a new big budget movie that promised to capture the pioneer era atmosphere in a grim survival story.
The movie starts out awesome enough, kicking off with a powerful Indians vs Pioneers battle scene that features incredibly long, action-packed shots. Unlike in the original story the movie is based on, Glass brings his half-Indian son along, creating some father/son moments and some tension with the other guys on his trek who are not that fond of savages. Shortly after, we are treated to the high point of the movie - the already famous bear scene, which is masterfully done, and painful to watch for its cruel realism.
Unfortunately, from there, it is all downhill.
The whole point of the original story, Fitzgerald and Bridger leaving Glass behind, gets watered down by the state Glass is pictured to be in - the way it is shown in the movie, it would have obviously been the only logical thing to do to leave him behind, with the Indians on the trek's tail and his chances of survival being nil.
Rather than creating a believable dilemma, the movie goes all over- the-top in Hollywood clichés. Instead of just leaving a maimed Glass behind for dead, Fitzgerald kills Glass'es son, turning a survival story into a revenge thriller. We are shown all kinds of bad aspects of Fitzgerald's character to turn him into "the bad guy" so we can root for Glass killing him at the end.
At the same time, the whole Indian side-story that was courageous enough to show Indians as ruthless attackers and not stick to the "noble savage" cliché gets watered down with an unbelievable silly twist when it is revealed that the Indians are just searching for the chieftain's kidnapped daughter, which we later find out was kidnapped by those pesky French, who do all kinds of badguy Indian killing stuff (as opposed to our noble pelt hunters, who are righteous decent human beings with the exception of the traitor Fitzgerald).
The actual survival story then gets completely out of hand, being so over-the-top as to remind me of action movies like Die Hard 2, that do not claim to be realistic and do not take themselves as serious as this movie. Glass, still in a state where he can only crawl, escapes the Indians by jumping into an ice-cold river, gets thrown down waterfalls, gets on a horse, falls down a cliff of around 100ft, etc etc etc. At this point, the survival story failed to grip me, since it was obviously based on comic book physics and -realism.
It gets even more ridiculous, when Glass manages to find the time on his survival ego trip to befriend a lone Indian (who is later killed by the evil, evil French, but not before healing Glass with some Indian sweat lodge magic), and even to rescue the Indian chieftain's daughter who was held prisoner as a rape object by the French, who again thankfully stepped in to fill in for the bad guys.
Despite all of this, the movie manages to stay pretty enjoyable (and never boring) until the ending, which was so horribly predictable that it made me cringe.
First Glass meets up with the rest of the trek, looking extremely healthy for what he's supposedly been through - DiCaprio could have at least lost some weight for this movie, or otherwise they could have used CGI to make him look thinner.
Fitzgerald escapes from the camp, stealing the money from the rest of the crew in the process (that baddie bad guy!). For some reason, even though they still have plenty of other men left, only Glass and the Captain set out as a group of two to hunt Fitzgerald down.
When the Captain then tells Glass some sentimental crap about his wife when they sit down at a fire at night, he might have just as well put on a red Star-Trek shirt, because it couldn't have been made any more obvious that he would be shot in the lead-up to the inevitable showdown between Glass and Fitzgerald.
Predictably enough, thats exactly what happens. To make matters worse, we are not only treated to the good old "both antagonists lose their weapons so it degenerates into a fist fight" cliché, but then, as the predictable fight, that tries to make up in cruelty what it lacks in innovation, inevitably ends with our hero Glass beating Fitzgerald and threatening to cut his throat, Fitzgerald tells him in a typical bad-guy way that killing him won't bring back his son, AND SO GLASS REFUSES TO KILL HIM. Are you kidding me? You just ruined the whole point of turning a survival story into a revenge trip, and lost the last bit of credibility the story had until now.
But of course we cannot let the bad guy get away, and so the actual killing is done by the Indians, who arrive just in time to finish Fitzgerald off and stare silently at Glass in a menacing silent Indian cliché thing. Since Glass saved his daughter's life, the Indian chieftain refrains from killing Glass, and instead rides off silently without acknowledging or helping the wounded Glass lying on the ground who saved his daughter's life. Makes sense.
The movie fades out with a shot of Glass staring into nothing. At least he didn't go after the chieftain's daughter to make some more Indian half-breed babies and live happily forever after.
6/10
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