Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, this 2016 film is a masterpiece that won the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Actor. Sakamoto was recovering from a 2014 attack of mid-pharyngeal cancer, and despite the fact that he was not in the best of physical condition, he accepted the commission from the best director of the day to produce the film. The resulting soundtrack is one of the most brilliant in the history of film music. In order to capture the atmosphere of the extremely cold northwestern region of the U.S., Sakamoto created a composition with very little time between phrases and almost no sense of time structure, creating music that is like a stream of breath. Chords are played by the strings. The reverberations fade away, leaving a void that can only be thought of as silence, and then the chords softly reappear. The sound expresses the rhythm of nature, or rather, the rhythm of the earth as a unit, which is completely different from the rhythm repeated with short beats. The fact that this work dares to have a live orchestra play such a structured sound, rather than a computer or electronic instruments, is also an amazing aspect of this work. In order to have the players, who can only communicate with each other through musical notation, play music with no time signature, Sakamoto wrote a bizarre score in which the beat changes with each measure, and succeeded in achieving the "pause" that he had envisioned. Of course, not all of the music is live orchestral music, but electronic sounds are skillfully incorporated, and it is also noteworthy that Sakamoto himself plays cello, electric guitar, and other instruments that he has not used very often. Due to his poor health, he had to seek help from Alva Noto and Bryce Dessner in the final stages of production, and as a result, he was not eligible for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, but he has created a soundtrack that is different from conventional film music, with operatic light motifs and synth sound effects, and that could be described as atmospheric. The result is a soundtrack that is different from conventional film music, with operatic light motifs and synth sound effects, and will be talked about for a long time to come.
The Japanese edition of the album includes the bonus track "The Revenant - Main Theme (Alva Noto Remodel R)".