Tarantino’s Struggles With ‘The Hateful Eight’ [Review]

The same week that Star Wars: The Force Awakens is available for rental, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film The Hateful Eight is the top rental and best-selling movie this week, according to Variety.

Tarantino’s mystery/Western, which was reportedly made for an estimated budget of $62 million, made a return of $54 million at the domestic box office as of the first of April.

The Hateful Eight did not get the same attention as Django Unchained and initially opened on a limited run to 100 theaters for a 70mm projection tour before it was distributed for wide release.

The tour included intermission in the middle of the movie for the more exclusive showings, much like many movies during the days of early cinema. Much of this was also related to the fact that it was shot with the same lenses that had not been used since the Hollywood epic Khartoum.

Indiewire writes about the amazing feat that engineers, projectionists, and theaters had to pull when the Weinstein Company first approached Boston Light and Sound about doing the tour.

“The project began with a nationwide search for 70mm equipment that had been abandoned or destroyed. Because there were not enough working or complete projectors and backup parts, BL&S had to design and manufacture 125 different parts, including gears, shafts, sprockets and rollers. They would also have to manufacture two different anamorphic lenses that could widen the image to accommodate Ultra Panavision’s extremely wide aspect ratio, develop kits that allowed old 35mm platters to handle the extra weight of a 3-hour-and-20-minute 70mm print, and locate and refurbish DTS playback systems to properly play the film’s sound. Oh, and so as to not burden DCP theaters that ripped out their film projectors years ago, all of this would need to be designed as a plug-and-play kit that could be shipped and quickly assembled in projection booths around the country.”

This would not be the only feat Tarantino would have to accomplish during this time. Because along with his public support and activism for Black Lives Matter, which resulted in boycott by a police union for The Hateful Eight, Tarantino’s film also accomplished the feat of getting composer Ennio Morricone his first Academy Award this year for scoring the movie, as he was reportedly entirely against working with Tarantino again.

This was referred to in Hollywood Reporter back in 2013 after both had worked on Django Unchained.

There is no doubt that Ennio Morricone’s music is what made many of Tarantino’s films memorable, perhaps even as a signature, as he’s known for using the composer’s music from other movies as a backdrop for his own films and soundtracks.

Morricone would eventually clarify that he wasn’t against Tarantino and that his statement was misunderstood and had not been fully reported, according to Rolling Stone.

Back To Basics

To a fault, Tarantino has always been very careful about his storytelling. If the cadence he often uses with the language of his characters is a sign of this, such as when one of them tends to explain a little more in their dialogue than a viewer is used to absorbing, then it’s less of a fault and more like a signature, which often results in memorable dialogue.

This tends to set a lot of moviegoers off, either hardening the loyalty of Tarantino fans or putting others off who feel his work is no longer as accessible as his biggest movie Pulp Fiction. The Hateful Eight is Tarantino’s strongest storytelling epic yet, taking completely original characters and relying on the strength of the actors to make the viewer care enough about them and to make three hours as compelling as possible.

There are still moments in the film where he makes some quirky decisions that often made me wonder why he did them. For instance, in the film, he decides to keep Samuel Jackson’s character in slow motion, along with some of his dialogue. The only thing I can assume from this is that it fits with the rhythm of the action that just took place on the screen.

This is similar to a decision he made on using Samuel Jackson as a voice-over in Inglorious Basterds, to provide set up for the ending by giving us a history on celluloid.

In the end, there’s nothing wrong with this, as with repeat viewings, they all become as natural and necessary as any other decision made in any other film.

There's the easy way and there's the Tarantino way. #TheHatefulEight https://t.co/OnJVjyiQGk pic.twitter.com/BIQ4UNL9eO

— The Hateful Eight (@thehatefuleight) April 8, 2016

Over the last few films, Tarantino has ventured more away from his fanboy copycat approach to movie making, where he’s focused less on paying homage to genres to crafting his artform, which The Hateful Eight does especially well.

He makes a bold return to the one-setting formula that centered around his first film Reservoir Dogs.

But The Hateful Eight has a similar problem that the recent example provided by the Inquisitr over Star Wars: The Force Awakens does, which is to position the plot in such a way that it seems designed only to rush the viewer to the point. But the movie is not inflicted as severely as the Disney hit is.

Quentin Tarantino States He Will Never Work for… https://t.co/7qFizVrFgp

— Hype Geeks (@Hype_Geeks) April 7, 2016

It should be noted that Tarantino made an appearance on The Howard Stern Show last December, and in his interview, expressed outrage that Disney had intentionally bumped his showing for the Star Wars premiere. The Inquisitr also wrote about the grudge.

As a correction to the Inquisitr article, the company threatened to pull Star Wars from all theaters owned by the Cinerama Dome’s company and not all theaters nationwide.

For those who haven’t seen the movie yet, here’s a spoiler. When Samuel Jackson’s character so perfectly figures out who the criminals are in the room, it seems rather superhuman without the context and somewhat absurd that with it, he didn’t know that there might be a space under the floorboards where someone can hide, which turns out to be a mistake. But again, it’s only there to drive the plot forward.

And the viewer gets to see the origins of the story and are in the position where we can see the consequences, but by the time we get it, it only provides weak momentum.

When all is said and done, the ending is less spectacular than expected and is left opened to rely on the audience’s moral compass to point them in the right or wrong direction.

A movie like The Hateful Eight is a rarity, as each turn in the story and plot brings surprises, shocks, and unexpected laughter where you really can’t trust anyone.

[Image via David Holt | Flickr | CC BY 2.0]