The Hateful Eight

The Hateful Eight is a very honest piece of work, in that it advertises its intentions right at the start. The opening credits take forever, and do nothing to advance the plot. I wonder why this is two hours and 48 minutes long, I thought as it started. Because it’s not afraid to indulge itself in boring your arse all the way off your body. The smart move at this point, before anyone says a word and six or seven minutes of snow have filled the screen, is to look over at the person who suggested giving it a shot and say “How about The Villainess instead?” I did not make the smart move. I never do.

The thing about Tarantino is that no matter how much his movies go wrong in general, there’s usually at least one scene that’s worth looking at again. Take Inglourious Basterds, which is kind of a hot mess, but still has two electric scenes with Christoph Waltz to balance out all the Basterd related nuttery. With The Hateful Eight, Tarantino had finally got enough creative control to do whatever the hell he wanted, so he made a widescreen movie where all the key scenes play in a confined space, and all the key players make you wish they’d died before the cameras started rolling. 

There’s no law that says that the characters in a movie have to be likeable. But if they’re not, they’d better be funny, breathtakingly charismatic, or have at least one facet which will make you care if they live or die. In one way. Tarantino gets this, because the characters who last the longest are played by the two most effortlessly charismatic actors in the cast, Samuel L Jackson and Walton Goggins. It’s a pity that they’re not funny or any kind of fun. Without those actors, they’d be just about unbearable. Even with them, I was thinking of one of my favourite ever Walton Goggins lines, from Predators, where he glibly announces that he was supposed to have been executed two days ago. This is another movie where that would have worked out fine.

The thing which really baffles me is that Tarantino went so nuts about widescreen. It’s one of a handful of movies shot in the last thirty or forty years in 65mm for projection from 70mm stock, and for the life of me, I can’t see anything in the movie which needed that kind of shooting quality. Tarantino was so determined about this that he forced a load of US cinemas to install 70mm projectors so that people would see the film as he’d imagined it. Peter goddam Jackson didn’t do that. Michael Mann might have released a few prints of Last of the Mohicans on 70mm, but that was shot on 35mm, and Last of the Mohicans is a genuinely gorgeous movie that made want a widescreen TV so that I could watch it on DVD properly. When I was watching The Hateful Eight on Netflix, there was no point where I thought to myself “I wish I’d seen this in a cinema so that I could really see this properly.” There’s nothing going on at any time which needs that level of splendour.

And I can’t help wondering. If Tarantino hadn’t been trying to make a good looking movie, would he have made something I actually wanted to watch?