Humax TV Tonight: Leonardo Di Caprio stars in The Revenant

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20 Jan

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The Revenant is on Channel 4 tonight at 10.50pm.

Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu's American frontier survival story, featuring an Oscar-winning lead performance by Leonardo Di Caprio. The film is based partly on true events and partly on Michael Punke's novel, The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge. There are two starring roles here. Firstly, Di Caprio's physically committed turn as Hugh Glass, a 19th-century fur trapper who gets savaged by a grizzly bear.

Secondly, the landscape as rendered by Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, who also worked with Iñárritu on 2014's equally acclaimed Birdman. Following Glass's grisly encounter with the bear, expedition leader Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) feels there will be only one outcome. Accordingly, he leaves John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), Glass's half-Native American son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), and a young member of the group, Bridger (Will Poulter), to comfort Glass as he dies.

But Fitzgerald can't be bothered with all that, so he kills Hawk in front of his incapacitated father, buries Glass alive and slopes off with Bridger in tow. And so begins Glass's death-defying, torturous journey through the American wilderness to avenge his son's murder. Revenant means something (especially a ghost) that returns. Will Glass have his revenge, or will the Badlands finally claim him?