Isn't this supposed to a battle? Almost everyone goes to confusion, camera shaking when it comes time to shoot war. How can you have correctly and conveniently placed elements in a battlefield? this goes against very nature of war that most directors are trying to capture, it's confusing and fast and people die all around you, you don't know what the hell is going on.

At least here it's captured in a long unbroken take and shakyness it's annoying, all those things you see there needed choreographing, rehearsing, it wasn't just Innaritu running through the field with previously giving some people instruction - "Ok, so just do some random stuff and I'll film it". This was very carefully planned out and shot with natural light which made this whole process that much harder.

To add to that, sure, there was no story but I wouldn't say that characters weren't developed, that is exactly what those dream sequences are for and we get more than enough on Hardy's character, like him being almost scalped and talking about his life and him literally needing pelts to survive, he's motivations are clear and so is his character, he doesn't want to die, not after getting through the sh*t that he got through.

Overall I just don't get your arguments, you are talking about movies dream like qualities like they were just thrown in there for gags when they are there to visually tell a story, who is Leo going to talk about? A tree? Just start randomly telling his son - "Hey, remember when your mother was killed?". And that was what Leo's character was, tough, quiet and dehumanized, he's not going to treat his son like some 3 old baby, he's in a war with Indians in the middle of f*king nowhere, what kind of heart warming treatment were people expecting?

Comparing Bay to literally any director is pointless, he simply wants every shot to move, he never slows down, he never stops, he's movies are tonally different, with those horrendous colors and beautiful actors. His style is a mess of sound, camera movements and literally everything moving. Revenant is a very slow movie, it's messy to an extent and only when it needs to be, in those battle sequences, nowhere else, I would hardly compare to Bay's style in any way.