Sometimes, as with “Birdman,” Mr. Iñárritu’s last movie, this desire to knock the audience out pays off. “The Revenant” is a more explicitly serious, graver and aspirational effort. Working again with a team that includes the director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki (whose credits include “Birdman”) and a handful of special-effects companies, Mr. Iñárritu creates a lush, immersive world that suggests what early-19th-century North America might have looked like once upon an antediluvian time. Yet he complicates the myth of the American Eden — and with it the myth of exceptionalism — by giving Glass an Indian wife and mixed-race son. It’s a strategic move (and another bit of sizzle) that turns a loner into a sympathetic family man. It also softens the story. Instead of another hunter for hire doing his bit to advance the economy one pelt at a time, Glass becomes a sentimentalized figure and finally as much victim as victimizer.

From Davy Crockett to Kit Carson, the mountain man has long had a hold on the American imagination and recently made a revisionist appearance in the form of Katniss Everdeen, the heroine of “The Hunger Games.” The mountain men in “The Revenant” are drawn along more traditional and masculine lines, from their bushy beards to the buckskins and bulky furs that at times make them look almost indistinguishable from the animals they kill. Mr. Iñárritu is entranced by this world, with its glories and miseries, its bison tartare and everyday primitivism, which he scrupulously recreates with detail and sweep. He’s particularly strong whenever Glass, employing that old can-do pragmatism, goes into survivalist mode to cauterize a wound, catch a fish or find shelter.

But Mr. Iñárritu blows it when he moves from the material to the mystical and tries to elevate an ugly story into a spiritual one, with repeated images of a spiral and even a flash of homespun magical realism. Worse, he makes Glass not just a helpless witness to a murder that’s a stand-in for the genocide of the Indians, but also a proxy victim of that catastrophe. It’s disappointing in a movie that offers much and that actually points to another foundation story that emerges when one of Glass’s companions, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), tries and fails to get paid for his labor. He learns too late that the system that turns people and animals into commodities is rigged against men like him. And while the simple facts of that system may be too brutal to feed the ambitions of a movie like “The Revenant,” we know that the system nevertheless helped build a nation.

“The Revenant” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult companion). Intense, at times graphic violence, including scenes involving animals. Running time: 2 hours 36 minutes.