Director Iñárritu co-wrote the screenplay with Mark L. Smith, the work being partly based Michael Punke’s book “The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge.” We follow a band of men fighting grueling conditions as they seek pelts to sell at their ultimate destination. It is an overly long film, tallying at 152 minutes, thus requiring extra audience endurance.

DiCaprio, playing Hugh Glass, based on a real, legendary character, battles with a vicious bear and it is hard to believe that he could survive such a mauling. Traveling with him is his teenage son, Hawk, a product of his marriage to a Pawnee woman, who we learn was killed by white soldiers and is seen only in flashback.

After the bear attack, Glass is callously left for dead. But Glass revives. (The title word revenant means back from the dead.) Glass has been so badly wounded in the bear attack, gruesomely filmed, that he can barely speak. But he summons his stamina and follows the trail to satisfy his reasons for revenge.

The characters are a grisly looking lot, with their beards and excess hair, and they begin to resemble the animals that they hunt. They behave like animals too, trying to survive the unforgiving nature of the old west depicted, with shooting in Canada and Argentina as stand-ins. Hostile Native Americans are an ever-present danger. Typical of the stomach-turning scenes is the scooping out of the insides of a dead horse to enable crawling in for shelter from the elements.