The Gore In Leonardo DiCaprio Movie The Revenant Is Causing Walk-Outs

There might be Oscar buzz around Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance in ‘The Revenant’, but there’s also talk of the excessive gore in the survival movie causing walk-outs.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, some viewers at early screenings of 'Birdman’ director Alejandro G. Inarritu’s new movie have found certain scenes too much to palate.

It’s thought that it’s a scene central to the plot that is causing most upset, in which DiCaprio’s frontiersman and fur-trapper Hugh Glass is mauled viciously by a grizzly bear.

He is then left for dead by those in his party, but somehow miraculously survives his injuries and sets out on the 200 mile trek to the nearest settlement seeking revenge.

The story is based on the real-life accounts of Glass – and the novel also called The Revenant written in 2002 – a frontiersman from Pennsylvania known for his adventurous exploits in the early part of the 19th century.

Glass was attacked by the bear in South Dakota in 1823 during a trapping expedition, and though he managed to kill the creature, he was left terribly injured and unconscious.

A General William Ashley, who was leading the party, requested two volunteers stay with him until he died of his injuries and then bury him.

Claiming that the were interrupted digging Glass’s grave by native American warriors, the two men, Jim Bridger and John Fitzgerald, took all Glass’s equipment, fled the scene and reported to Ashley that Glass had died.

He had not, however, and despite a broken leg, festering wounds, and gouges on his ribs down to the bone, he wrapped himself in the bear’s carcass and began the 200 mile journey to Fort Kiowa on the Missouri river.

In the movie, the drama is ratcheted up by Tom Hardy’s antagonist Fitzgerald, a criminal on the run who is the ring-leader in robbing Glass and leaving him to die.

There’s plenty of potential gore in the real-life accounts, and while some have hailed the movie as DiCaprio’s most likely shot at an Oscar (he’s lost out five before now), others have found its brutality difficult to reconcile.

One source told THR that the movie was 'Long. Brutal. No clear eco message. Violent and pointless. Revenge in the wilderness’.

Others, however, have dubbed it 'a masterpiece’, and a 'slam dunk’ for a Best Picture Oscar nomination.

DiCaprio has called the shoot ‘agonising’.

He told Yahoo Movies in October: “I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do.

“Whether it’s going in and out of frozen rivers or sleeping in animal carcasses or what I ate on set. [I was] enduring freezing cold and possible hypothermia constantly.

"I certainly don’t eat raw bison liver on a regular basis,” he continued. “When you see the movie, you’ll see my reaction to it because Alejandro kept it in. It says it all. It was an instinctive reaction."

Check out the breathless trailer below…

Also starring Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter and Lukas Hass, it’s due out in the UK on January 15.

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Image credits: 20th Century Fox