Originally Posted by Nosferatu@Cult Labs  I saw The Hateful Eight a couple of days ago and intended on writing something sooner, but have been cracking on with university work. There is probably little point in talking about the plot, so I'll just limit this to my opinion.
This is clearly a vanity piece for Tarantino who wanted to make a permanent impact on American cinema by making the first 70 mm 'Roadshow' film since the mid-1960s (I believe the 1966 film Khartoum directed by Basil Dearden was the last) and, to be absolutely fair, the film is beautifully shot and I wish I had a screen bigger than 42 inches to see the few landscape scenes again – Cineworld boycott meant I couldn't see it at the cinema – and it is incredibly well designed, blocked, and staged. It has also been designed within an inch of its life, from just about every strand of facial hair to the costumes and the interiors of the stagecoach and Minnie's Haberdashery (including props) are wonderful to watch. The choice of actors and, in Ennio Morricone, composer, also smacks of a director in full control of everything except the script leak which threatened to derail the entire project.
As with Tarantino's previous films done this way, the chapter format makes for an episodic viewing which contains both good and bad. I can't remember the numbers or names at the moment, but a couple of them were overly wordy and a bit dull, whereas the second half of the one in which Samuel L Jackson takes centre stage is crackling with tension and has great dynamics between the characters. However, I could have done without the unnecessary (and uncredited) narration by Tarantino with an indistinguishable accent.
Even with the nearly three-hour running time, you are left not knowing much about many of the characters, with only Chris Mannix and Marquis Warren given decent, though spurious and potentially fictional, backgrounds, so the characters aren't even as well-developed as in Reservoir Dogs, which has a running time of just over half the length!
Like I said, there is some really good stuff there, and Morricone's score is worthy of all the praise and awards which went his way, and some of the acting is excellent, but I'm certainly not in a rush to watch it a second time. |