I don't really feel qualified to indulge in my usual set of Oscar predictions this year (the decline in my hit-rate over the years may also have made me a little reluctant to have a go), but, as luck would have it, I still have up my sleeve some notes on the film which – somewhat bemusingly, if you ask me – has made all the running so far ahead of this year's awards. Personally, watching this movie and then reading the rapturous reviews just made me feel a bit stupid, like I was somehow missing something very obvious.

This is, admittedly, a slightly negative note upon which to start a review, but then it seems somewhat in keeping with the general tone of Alejandro G Inarritu's The Revenant, which is one of most thorough-goingly bleak and uncompromising films I've seen in a long while.

You want to hear about the story? Well, frankly, it strikes me as a rather secondary element of the film, but here we go: in 1823, a party of trappers in a remote North American wilderness find themselves under relentless attack by a war party of the local Ree Native American tribe. A handful of the men manage to escape the slaughter, due in no small part to the expertise of their guide and scout, Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio), a man well-versed in the ways of the locals (he even has a half-native son to prove it).

However, as the group struggles back to their base, disaster strikes when Glass is attacked and savagely mauled by a grizzly bear, leaving him close to death. The leader of the group, Captain Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), refuses to leave Glass to die alone, and eventually agrees to pay a few of the men to stay with him and do what's necessary. Taking him up on this offer is the slightly unhinged Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy at his Tom Hardiest), who, with respect to the whole stay with Glass – wait till he dies – bury him plan, is quite prepared to skip the middle step…

But Fitzgerald has reckoned without Glass' almost inhuman will to survive, and the guide crawls out of his grave and slowly begins to recuperate, intent on getting his revenge on Fitzgerald. But there are many miles of frozen wilderness, filled with hostile Ree, between Glass and his objective, and Fitzgerald is not a man to take lightly…

Well, it sounds like the stuff of a fairly traditional action-adventure story, with a lot of western trappings, and I suppose to some extent it is: there are lots of shootings, stabbings, and various fights during the film's very considerable running time. But it never really feels like an actual action-adventure, and probably even less like a western. It's just a bit too relentlessly bleak and horrible for that.

I was browsing around some of my old reviews, seeing what I'd written about other problematic Oscar nominees in the past, and I came across what I said about 12 Years a Slave. Many of the things I said then definitely rang a bell with what was going through my mind about The Revenant – 'a horrific world of violence, pain, and misery', 'a grim and deeply uncomfortable experience from start to finish', and 'almost totally bereft of traditional entertainment value'.

Well, I should make it very clear that I don't think The Revenant is a bad film; by any objective standard, this is a film made with enormous skill and thoughtfulness. There are very few moments of it which are not strikingly beautiful to look at, and – while not as tricksy as the single-take shenanigans of Birdman – Inarritu engages in some bravura camerawork at key moments in the story.

But at the same time I can't help wondering if there is less going on here than meets the eye. On one level, this is a simple story about a man who simply refuses to die until he's carried out his self-appointed mission, and what such a man is capable of (I wasn't surprised to see that DiCaprio has said this is one of the toughest films he's ever done, nor that he had five stunt doubles – I imagine the first four died mid-shoot). But on another level… well, that's the thing, if there is another level I don't really see what it is. It's just buried a bit too deeply.

It doesn't really help that much of the peripheral plot feels a bit murky, too – the fact that a lot of the dialogue, Tom Hardy's in particular, is delivered in such a thick accent as to be utterly unintelligible, is probably responsible for some of this. But there are subplots whose connection to the main story seem either unarticulated or entirely arbitrary – a party of Ree wander through the film, searching for a kidnapped young woman. They play a key role in the resolution of the climax but I've no idea why things play out in the way they do, based on what I saw in the rest of the film.

Another relevant line from the 12 Years piece is 'this sort of factually-inspired historical gloom-a-thon is almost always made with a view to pushing a particular political or moral point', and this time around it's the treatment of native Americans that the film has something to say about. It is, as you would expect, a very revisionist western (to the extent it's a western at all), and while the Ree may carry out atrocities against the European characters, it's made very clear that they are ultimately victims rather than aggressors.

As I said, this is a serious film, and a well-made and good-looking one. I'm not completely sure if the performances are actually as good as all that, but I suppose the willingness of the performers to suffer for their art, not to mention their services to the growing of luxuriant beards, demand some sort of recognition. And I know the Academy likes serious films, and historical films (especially ones about American history). But 12 Oscar nominations? Really? That's more than The Godfather, West Side Story, or Lawrence of Arabia, and The Revenant isn't in the same league as any of them.

I think it's probably just a case of momentum, that this film is the work of a bunch of people whom the Academy, on some subliminal level, is aware it really likes and feels like it should be nominating on a regular basis – Inarritu, obviously, following his success last year, and also DiCaprio – who's almost become one of those people whose lack of an Oscar colours how they are perceived. Maybe even Tom Hardy has also joined this club, he's certainly done good enough work in plenty of high-profile films recently.

The Academy is ultimately a political body with its own little quirks and fixations and I think it's this that explains why The Revenant has done quite so well in terms of racking up the gong nominations this year. I will say again that it's not a bad film, though neither will it suffuse you with joy and good humour: it is very heavy going. On the whole, much easier to admire than to actually like or enjoy.

Awix

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