It’s hard to believe it’s been almost a decade since the New French Extremity—a group of French genre films united by, to put it simply, a lot of disgusting gore—exploded with titles like Frontier(s), Inside, and Sheitan coming out over a short time span. In 2008, the movement reached its peak with Martyrs, Pascal Laugier’s controversial take on martyrdom that had people fleeing for the exits. Martyrs has gained a strong following since it came out, partly because of how it transcends the expectations of an exploitation film. It’s a film that shows women being systematically tortured, but labeling it as “torture porn” would be wrong. Laugier examined the meaning of being a martyr, along with the connection between immense suffering and transcendence through pain. Martyrs stuck out not just because of its gore; it was a philosophical horror film, one with significant ambitions that combined intellectual themes and the kind of horrifying content associated with the lowest common denominator. Even the film’s harshest critics couldn’t deny that Laugier, despite his methods, was trying to say something.

So what happens when US filmmakers take Laugier’s work and adapt it for English-speaking audiences? After several false starts, this new Martyrs has finally come to fruition via the help of directors Kevin and Michael Goetz, The Revenant screenwriter Mark L. Smith, and horror “it” producer Jason Blum. Blumhouse, the production company responsible for the Paranormal Activity and Insidious franchises, is known for its successful approach to making horror films: make a film for a low budget, then have major studios pick up and release them. It’s a successful model because it takes advantage of horror’s self-generating interest (genre films don’t need big stars to attract moviegoers) while providing big profits given the low production cost. That is, in a nutshell, the model behind multiple horror success stories over the past several years, including films like The Purge and Sinister.

Blumhouse has tweaked and perfected a micro-budget machine, and as much as the company can tout its increased creative control or ability to produce outside of the studio system, it’s still a machine. Laugier handled writing and directing duties on the original Martyrs, and it’s obvious that it’s a film with his individual stamp on it. With the remake, the Goetz brothers and Smith transplant Laugier’s work to a format more focused on quick returns and basic thrills, a change that’s like shoving a square peg into a round hole. The set-up is more or less identical to Laugier’s film: Lucie (Troian Bellisario) claims she was kidnapped and tortured by a group of people as a child before escaping, although police found no evidence backing up her story. Fifteen years after escaping, Lucie finally tracks down her kidnappers—a seemingly ordinary couple with two teenage children—and ruthlessly slaughters them in their own home. She calls on Anna (Bailey Noble), her best friend growing up at the orphanage, to help her remove the bodies, although Anna starts doubting Lucie’s sanity given she just gunned down a family without remorse (fair warning: those unfamiliar with either version of Martyrs should stop reading here unless they want to be spoiled).

Since this is a horror movie, Lucie’s claims turn out to be true. The people she killed did, in fact, torture her as a child, and Anna soon discovers they were part of a cult dedicated to creating martyrs in an attempt to understand what lies in the afterlife. Smith’s screenplay, in what some might point to as a true example of what “Americanizing” something means, dumbs things down to make the religious themes impossible to miss, whether it’s having the cult’s leader (Kate Burton) spell everything out or using the image of a woman burning at the stake. At the very least, Smith does try to change things up from Laugier’s original screenplay in the latter half, honing in on Anna and Lucie’s friendship instead of the barbaric plot they’ve become a part of. But that focus only muddles the thematic content that made up the backbone of Laugier’s film, and Smith makes no efforts to adjust the rest of the source material to his changes.

What Martyrs amounts to is a cheap mess, an attempt to adapt a work more focused on ideas into something designed to provide thrills and action, and the clash between the two modes is an ugly one. The Goetz brothers, try as they might to claim they’re doing their own spin on the original, settle into what feels like a shot for shot remake; the punishing final act of Laugier’s film, designed to make its climactic moment of transcendence all the more powerful, gets replaced by a vengeance-fueled firefight instead; the violence gets toned down significantly, a choice that could have worked had it not reeked of the producers trying to ensure they’d get an R rating; and the ending tries to maintain the original’s ambiguity while tying up Anna and Lucie’s storyline in a way that betrays the film’s own themes. Martyrs is nothing more than a complete waste of time, a remake whose own irrelevance dominates every frame. Rather than try to respect the original content beyond its gory surface, Martyrs prefers to trace over its more violent moments, cherry picking what it needs to make something more inclined to entertain than provoke. Unlike Laugier’s unforgettable film, it’s best to forget this version of Martyrs ever happened.

In Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio plays survivalist legend Hugh Glass, a frontiersman betrayed by both his land and fellow man, left ripped and ravaged without anything left to live for. Inch by inch we watch Glass crawl and tumble across miles and miles of picturesque Great Plains scenery, and little by little it becomes clear that, despite the film’s impossibly grandiose, elaborate, labored production, its story is relatively uncomplicated. Sitting firmly in the annals of American Myth, Glass’ journey is about little more than the unexpected fruits of grit and resilience, a classic survivalist tale through and through.

It’s an interesting thing marrying such a straightforward narrative (based loosely on Michael Punke‘s 2002 novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge) with Iñárritu’s overblown sense of spectacle and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki‘s floating, balletic long-takes. The combination works, but on a level that likely isn’t as high-minded or deeply spiritual as the filmmakers intended. The sights are soar, the sounds swirl, but what keeps things grounded and compelling are the hardworking actors and the simple satisfaction of watching a man on a mission, fighting tooth and nail to reach his target.

The target is a cantankerous, slippery brute called Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy) who earns Glass’ ire thoroughly. The rivals are a part of an expedition for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, scouring the land for pelts to trade. While gathered on the Missouri river, the group is attacked by the Arikara tribe in a dizzying, dazzling bombardment of grotesque tomahawk and arrow kills punctuated by blood-curdling screams of agony all around. The men barely make it out alive, their numbers severed. When a grizzly bear mauling leaves Glass fatally wounded, the captain of the hunting party (Domhnall Gleeson) deems it too dicey to transport him via stretcher across the rocky terrain, leaving him under the care of Fitzgerald and a boy scout-ish tagalong (Will Poulter). They’re offered extra pay to stay behind and give their dying comrade a proper burial upon his all but inevitable death, and while Fitzgerald hasn’t got an ounce of compassion in him, he needs the cash considering they were forced to abandon their precious pelts in the escape from the Arikara. Once the rest of the party leaves, however, he plots a scheme more befitting of his nefarious attitude.

Glass was a real man, though what we see in The Revenant has gone through three filters of fictionalization—the history books, Punke and Iñárritu. After the Fitzgerald betrayal, the film follows Glass as he uses his frontier skills to nurse himself back to health while he tracks down the man who left him for dead. It’s a big, heaping plate of revenge and outdoors survival that’s meaty enough on its own, though Iñárritu and Lubezki add unneeded garnishes (shallow spirituality and white-guilt symbolism) that almost spoil the meal.

DiCaprio’s performance is tremendous in that he uses every inch of his body to tell Glass’ story. It’s a mostly non-verbal role that sees him expressing a wide range of emotion with his eyes (in the chunk of the story where Glass is incapacitated) and with his entire body as he slowly rehabilitates and traverses the unforgiving terrain. Overwhelmingly, this is a story of despair and tragedy, but we do get to see love in Glass’ eyes early on. In flashback, we see his Pawnee wife and their teenage son (Forrest Goodluck), who he raised to be a tracker like himself. Their fates, of course, aren’t sunny because…Iñárritu. DiCaprio. Tragedy is their jam, man.

Iñárritu and Lubezki teeter on the line between visual splendor and artistic arrogance so precariously that it adds to the excitement of their films in an almost meta way. Sometimes the imagery is ingenious; when Glass is all but crippled, Lubezki presents the surrounding landscape as not beautiful, but paralyzingly frightening in its endlessness. But then a bird flies out of a dying woman’s chest and you can’t help but laugh at how silly it looks. The ambition is bloated and these guys are totally caught up in their artsy maestro bullshit, but even the weakest shots in this movie (most of them involving iffy CG elements) have enough flair to them that you can hardly turn your attention from the screen.

Subtlety and thematic complexity aren’t Iñárritu’s strengths, so when The Revenant lets go of its “big ideas” and focuses on Glass’ manhunt, things get really good. Hardy plays a terrific scumbag, so when Glass finally get his hands on Fitzgerald, it’s both gratifying and insanely intense. Admittedly, the pleasures found in the excessively gory final showdown are decidedly testosterone-driven, but if you approach the movie as a primal tale of bloody revenge (á la Kill Bill and Mad Max: Fury Road, for example), there’s no reason to apologize for reveling in all the limb-hacking and eye-gouging.

If there’s one thing about The Revenant that irked me, it’s Iñárritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith‘s decision to push the story as a revisionist western in which the sins of the Native American genocide are examined through the eyes of a bunch of white guys. It’s an insult to both the Native American perspective, which is almost always grossly underrepresented in these kinds of stories, and to the real Glass, whose extraordinary ordeal is more than worthy enough of a movie on its own without faux-mystical themes muddying everything up.