Starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Rated 14A.

An inadequate script is superbly executed in The Revenant, turning half a movie’s worth of material into an exhausting, if occasionally transcendent, trek that congratulates the viewer for having survived its icy blasts of testosterone.

Based in part on the exploits of Hugh Glass—or at least on several books about him—the two-and-a-half-hour film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Glass, a Scots-American trapper in the early 19th century. (He was called Zach Bass when Richard Harris played the same character in 1971’s Man in the Wilderness.) Slogging through the chilly Rockies, our guy is scouting for a fur-swapping outfit loosely held together by a quasi-officer played by Domhnall Gleeson. Glass has an almost-grown son (Forrest Goodluck) by an absent native woman, and something about this, or his basic authority, triggers the bitter resentment of fellow hunting party member John Fitzgerald, played by Tom Hardy, with an accent so thick-tongued I still have no idea what he said about anything.

Far from the main party, Glass is suddenly mauled by a bear in the most stomach-churning scene of the season, and Fitzgerald wants to leave him behind. The much younger Jim Bridger (Will Poulter) is somehow convinced to go along with that, although he later claims not to have understood Fitzgerald, and we believe him. The gravely wounded scout then suffers one depredation after another in his quest to return to civilization, and of course to wreak revenge on the dudes who deserted him.

In real life, Glass never saw Fitzgerald again, and Bridger went on to become a famous explorer. But director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, having survived his bout of urban satire with Birdman, isn’t content to let nature inflict its wintry drama on our hero’s body. Sure, Leonardo’s character has to cut open a horse and crawl inside it to survive a snowstorm, but he also needs multiple foes of the human kind. That’s a shame, because the real drama here is in the landscapes captured by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki—mostly in Alberta, then Argentina, when they ran out of snow. The movie labours hard to capture the humbling spirituality of The Tree of Life and other Terrence Malick films, but its sometimes astounding beauty remains surprisingly shallow.