Editing Contrast

Films normally have a set rule in which action scenes are quick paced with lots and lots of cuts, whereas a conversational scene would be far sower, with less cuts to accommodate the slower pace.

The Revenant is notoriously slow paced.

The Revenant, despite its overall slow pace, was very well received by critics and audiences; Leonardo DiCaprio even won his first Oscar for his acting in this feature. As mentioned before, the pace of this film is very slow, as a lot of scenes are dialogue based, relaxed, and quiet. The editor reinforces these ideas by using notably long takes compared to other films. This was a standout feature in a lot of scenes, including the famous bear fight scene.

This scene is all one entire take, lasting over 

2 minutes.

What you can take from this is that when you edit a particularly hard hitting or generally action oriented scene in a film, using one long take that gets close to the action can theoretically allow you to focus in on the action a lot better than if the editor chose to make the action sequences out of a lot of takes.

The pace may be affected by the lack of cuts, but the tension of having no cuts is greatly accentuated, and is excellent as this was most probably intended.