For more than a few raving cinephiles, watching a Quentin Tarnatino film is a bit like going on a scavenger hunt through the filmmaker’s personal movie library. It’s a history lesson where the students (i.e. the audience) must teach themselves enough about a certain type of film history to catch all of the references. The danger of watching any movie this way is that some may get so excited about identifying the references that they mistake this sense of accomplishment for the film actually being good. Fortunately for us, Tarantino cares more about creating richly drawn and downright freaky characters just a little bit more than he does trying to play guessing games. He’s also become something of a master at crafting stories that not only make it damn near impossible to predict the ending, but the journey itself is an intricately woven garment made of stitching that never quite goes in a straight line and is just as much of a mystery.
THE HATEFUL EIGHT, Tarantino’s eighth feature, is a true and proper Western (DJANGO UNCHAINED is realistically more of a Southern), set in Wyoming a short number of years after the end of the Civil War. The timeframe is vague, but it’s clear that those members of the titular eight who served during the battle between the North and South still harbor old grudges and bear old wounds—physical and otherwise. The details of the vast landscape are obscured by deep, blinding snow. As the film opens, we see a stagecoach racing across the screen, toward the town of Red Rock where one of the coach’s passengers, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), is being delivered to the local law to be tried and hung by her neck, courtesy of the other passenger, bounty hunter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell). The two are handcuffed together, presumably until death they do part.
The coach, driven by the purposeful O.B. Jackson (James Parks and not officially part of the Eight), is just barely staying ahead of a nasty blizzard that will likely force it to stop before Red Rock. Making this all the more likely are two unplanned stops the carriage makes to pick up stranded bystanders on the road. The first is Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a black former union soldier (still in uniform), who is also a bounty hunter, with three dead bodies stacked up (each worth a pretty penny) and a horse, dead from exhaustion; the other stranger is Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), about as nasty a southern cracker as there ever was, who says he’s the new sheriff of Red Rock, and that unless they take him, Ruth will have no one to turn Daisy into and get paid.
Tarantino’s writing is so carefully paced and his reveals so perfectly timed that he could have made a 90-minute film about these four people in a stage coach, and that would have been a hell of an experience. Just enough of each one of their lives is revealed that we get a sense of both their shared and dissimilar histories. Mannix is the son of a known scoundrel and was a member of a notorious gang of killers during the war, while Warren was a legend and is said by many to have been a personal pen pal of President Lincoln himself (he carries one of the many letters from Lincoln to prove it).
On the other side of the coach are the shackled captor and captive, with Daisy being one of the nastiest, most racist pieces of work you’ll see in a movie this year. For a film with only one prominent black character in it, a certain racial slur gets tossed around rather freely and frequently by all. It’s a Tarantino film, so this isn’t exactly a surprise. Leigh is like a wild animal, cursing, lying, thrashing and occasionally taking a punch with the best of them.
THE HATEFUL EIGHT expands its scope upon the arrival at Minnie’s Haberdashery, at which we are introduced to the other half of our Eight—three wayward travelers, including Tim Roth’s Oswaldo Mobray, a British-born hangman by trade, who just happens to be headed Red Rock as well; Michael Madsen as cowboy Joe Gage, headed to see his ailing mother near the town, who also seems to be penning his life story to kill the time; and Bruce Dern as General Sandy Smithers, a southern officer known for killing black soldiers rather than taking them captive during the war—a fact that Warren is all-too familiar with. Rounding out the eight is Bob (Demian Bichir), a Mexican that the absent Minnie left in charge of the cabin/general store. Not long after their arrival, Ruth makes it clear to Warren that he’s certain one ore more of these men is not who he appears to be and that likely there is a plot afoot to spring Daisy from her chains. He’s not wrong.
Despite a great deal of talking, double dealing, shocking reveals, and a tremendous amount of blood, the rest of the film is a surprisingly faithful remake of John Carpenter’s THE THING, right down the presence of Kurt Russell, a lot of snow, and a wonderfully retro-sounding new score by Ennio Morricone (Tarantino also uses a section of Morricone’s music from THE THING in this film, as if to acknowledge the homage). More specifically, the writer-director re-creates Carpenter’s feeling of dread, claustrophobia, and paranoia from that film, as Russell attempts to figure out who among them is genuine and who are harmful. Each character is asked to reveal their personal story and what brought them to Minnie’s, and Ruth judges their believability accordingly
If he’d set his mind to it, Tarantino could have staged this tale as a theater piece, since most of the film takes place in one of two settings. But if he’d done that, audiences would have missed out on THE HATEFUL EIGHT’s most prized asset—its presentation in Ultra Panavision 70mm. There’s no reason to miss this impossibly rare opportunity to see the film projected this way, as wide and breathtaking as it gets, courtesy of Tarantino and Scorsese favorite, cinematographer Robert Richardson, who captures the expansive, desolate Wyoming terrain with such detail, you feel you can dive headfirst into the endless snow. It’s almost humorous that so much of the film takes place in cramped quarters (either in the coach or the cabin), yet somehow the Panavision still does its job—in this case, you can practically fit the entire room in the frame, so there’s a great deal to look at and pay close attention to. Set aside the better part of three-and-a-half hours for the full-length roadshow version of the movie, which includes introductory music, an intermission, and three hours of movie.
At a certain explosive moment in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, the film’s timeline jumps back to earlier in the day (the entire film takes place in less than 24 hours) to the couple of hours before the stagecoach arrived at Minnie’s, and before long, most of the film’s big secrets are revealed in what appears to be an entirely different film set at the same cabin. We meet Minnie (Dana Gourrier), as well as some of her employees, including one played by Zoe Bell (best known for her work as Uma Thuman’s stunt double in the KILL BILL films, as well as for riding the hood of a car in DEATH PROOF). We also meet a character played by Channing Tatum, and the less known about him, the better.
During the bloody final act of THE HATEFUL EIGHT, enemies become allies, partners consider jumping ship on each other, and hell is unleashed in the close quarters of the haberdashery. We may have come to expect this from Tarantino at this point, but it’s also exactly what we need in movies right now. No lives are beyond ending, no sacred-cow actor is too legendary to Tarantino that he/she can’t be murdered (special recognition must go out to Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, whose blood-and-guts make-up work is so grotesquely splashy, their names come immediately after Tarantino’s in the end credits). The director refuses to sit back and adhere to conventional storytelling, and modern filmmaking is all the better for it.
It’s no accident that the only character who never lies holds a special place in final moments of THE HATEFUL EIGHT. This is no morality tale, and you may not like that it’s this particular person who reaches this pinnacle, but you can take some comfort in the fact that the story’s most honest creation will likely be the person to retell the tale down the line. Tarantino has birthed a down-and-dirty, snow-blasted, leathery tall tale, and he’s presenting it in a way that hides nothing and gives audiences a screen size finally large enough to hold one of his wonderfully realized stories. It’s a perfect storm for movie lovers, Tarantino admirers, and those who appreciate a bit of spectacle with their gun play.
