The Revenant is set in a snowy wilderness so beautifully shot that it takes a while before you can focus on anything else. It makes you realize how seldom contemporary American filmmakers go outside, way outside, into the mysteriously splendid world we live in. Human beings are the ugly two-legged things that don’t belong in such a setting, as The Revenant shows us over and over. With humans comes stupid chaos, and constant noise.

The noise is one of the most interesting things about the film. In a remarkable soundtrack choice, director Alejandro González Iñárritu opted to make even the quietest human endeavor loud and intrusive. Early in the film, the protagonist — mountain man Hugh Glass (Leonardo Di Caprio) — goes hunting and makes such a ruckus lumbering through the woods that you’d expect all wildlife to flee the area. Nevertheless, he blunders upon a mother bear and her cubs and gets mauled nearly to death.

All I could think of in this moment was “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” — Mark Twain’s brilliant takedown of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, which feature various characters, supposedly well-versed in “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” tripping and clattering through the trees in clumsy pursuit of each other: