There's a certain classic feel to this movie. Most would point to Agatha Christie and Clue. That's because this movie is a mystery, or perhaps an old-fashioned whodunnit, and a mostly well-done whodunnit at that. There were certain aspects of this film that I wasn't a fan of - and that really came down to the mysterious answer to that question. It just isn't the direction I would have gone. I would have given this movie a higher score if it turned out differently - in fact it's the second to last chapter that changed my outlook on the entire movie. I wouldn't say anything was ruined, just changed.
This film has all the typical Tarantino elements when it comes to violence and not-really-but-technically-a-western elements - but there isn't really any action. This is a violent drama mystery that focuses most of its strength on written dialogue. This is Tarantino's best work - when it comes to dialogue only. It was so well-written that it often felt theatrical...in a good way. The only time I didn't care for people talking is when Tarantino would randomly narrate chapter headings. I understand that adds to the classic feeling...a directoral introduction, if you will...but at the same time, that removes from the cinematic feeling.
Perhaps one of the main issues I had with this film was the runtime. His movies have a tendency to run long, but most the time I don't really mind...this time I did. Yes, a lot of the scenes were integral to developing characters, including backstories and overall atmosphere...but I kept thinking the movie could be shortened and maintain everything of importance.
On a technical level, this movie is phenomenal. It's hard to complain about anything in terms of musical score, acting, directing, writing, lighting, editing, the works. Everything behind the scenes was perfectly balanced and carefully produced - something Tarantino is well known for, regardless of entertainment value. The Hateful Eight is a pretty decent mystery when it came to story - and one that is sure to lure more audiences in over the years. Check it out!
A film that has all the hallmarks of Tarantino's previous films, and one that also embodies everything both good and bad about Tarantino as a filmmaker. Creatively there is nothing new here that he hasn't explored before, and whilst the film is engaging enough, this more than most of his previous entries leaves one feeling that Tarantino has nowhere else to go. The credit flourish that boldly states this is "the 8th film" to come from the filmmaker only serves to highlight at least an underlying sense that nobody questions his creative decisions anymore and this is a film in sore need of an editor. The film may be beautifully shot, but the eponymous eight are surprisingly uninteresting characters, largely dependent on the charisma of the actors playing them. It should come as no surprise therefore that Jackson dominates, but equally there is a sense that Tarantino is repeating himself, never more so than with Madsen's character for example (though it seems that Madsen has been playing the same character all his life). Thus with only Jackson and to a certain extent Leigh providing much interest, conversations between all the principals tend to meander with seemingly little point and most of the outdoor location work serves as little more than window dressing. There is a fun 90 minute mystery thriller set in one location somewhere in here, but unfortunately this is one film that feels bloated and excessive as a result of Tarantino's script rather than enhanced by it. Perhaps next time, Tarantino should consider that verbose doesn't always equate to interesting and there are better ways to develop characters that audiences can empathize with - Jackie Brown seems such a long time ago, yet suggests that Tarantino may now be better suited to adapting other's characters rather than repeating his own.
This is my third Tarantino film (seen Kill Bill 1 & 2) and he doesn't fail to impress so far. This one's a western mystery thriller with snow instead of sand, I love the idea.
The first act is arguably the film's strongest, it's such a strong setup, very dialogue driven and it really takes you into the late 1800's period. The second act was my favorite, perfect character introductions, interesting character interactions and you can see everything is cleverly setting up for some kind of twist. The third act arrives and it's a totally unpredictable twist but as smart as this movie is I think it has some logic problems. It seems to me like they went through a lot of trouble with all this setup when they could have simply shot the major (and everyone else) the second they entered the cabin, it was totally doable. But anyways it's a movie so it didn't stop my enjoyment. Third act was epic.
Absolutely beautiful scenery and it's all shot very well. Tarantino really captured the cold with this one, felt like the cold was coming out of the TV, had to go get a blanket. The score is perfect, clever dialogue, lots of dark humor and tension filled. Both the narration and the slow-motion felt like an insult to this movie, totally unnecessary. Samuel L. Jackson blew it out of the park, one of his best performances.
"Move a little strange, you're gonna get a bullet. Not a warning, not a question...A bullet!" - Major Marquis Warren
The story is about a blizzards strands together a group of bounty hunters and ne'er-do-wells in a Wyoming cabin. But the small group is about to face a trail of betrayal and deception - and survival is certainly not guaranteed.
So I've finally got a chance to watch The Hateful Eight and I thought it was great. Mr. Tarantino has done it again everyone and while I don't think it's he's best one (In my opinion) but I would be lying to myself and to you if I didn't say I was entertained.
Quentin Tarantino is one of the best directors working today and he hasn't lost his touch yet, because he's directing in this movie was both stylish and old school. What Tarantino dose so brilliantly well in his movies is not only the dialogue or the character's, but the influences from other movies that he loves, because he is one of the biggest movie buffs I've ever seen. In The Hateful Eight, Tarantino takes movies like: The Thing, Murder on the Orient Express and Clue, all in one movie but with a gory twist. Even with the trouble of making this movie (mostly the script being leaked online), Tarantino still manages to pull off one heck of a movie with top notch directing.
There's a lot of big name actors in this movie and every single one of them shine in their roles. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins and Tim Roth were all phenomenal, but Samuel L. Jackson was freaking outstanding and completely stole the show. Now after thinking about it, every single character in this movie is a horrible person and just imagine how hard it would have been for any writer to make us find enjoyment in theses character's, but that's what Quentin Tarantino is always best at doing.
Another thing that's worth bringing up is the score for this movie, as it's more than good, it's fantastic. Ennio Morricone is the master of music composers and he's score for this movie was freaking magnificent. After the movie was over I was humming the score, it was that good. I hope he wins Best Original Score at the Oscars, because he deserves it.
The cinematography was amazing (whenever they're not in a room), it was engaging and the movie did grow on me after awhile.
Now for the flaws: The character logic towards the end of the movie didn't really make that much sense to me, as it really detached from what the movie perfectly set up at the beginning, but that's just me.
When Zoe Bell character says that Auckland is New Zealand's biggest city. Auckland didn't become New Zealand's largest city until the 1900s, surpassing Dunedin. There's many other historical errors in this movie.
Overall rating: The Hateful Eight is everything that you wanted in a Quentin Tarantino film. The dialogue was engaging, all of the performances were amazing and the score was just perfect.
In the mid-19th century, a blinding snowstorm blows several crooked paths to one central location: a haberdashery in the middle of nowhere. Here, a motley gathering of bounty hunters, fugitives, lawmen and soldiers takes place, but nothing is quite as it seems. Eight may walk in, but far fewer will see the sunlight when this storm clears.
Structurally, The Hateful Eight is quite similar to Tarantino's first effort, Reservoir Dogs. A wide variety of brash, violent, colorful characters, bouncing off the walls (not to mention each other) in an enclosed space while an unseen threat keeps them right where they are. Secrets abound, betrayals too, with the audience kept as much in the dark as the participants. Both are reminiscent of a one-set stage show, really, with the added benefit of cinematography.
The biggest stumbling block here is setup, specifically how much of it there is before the plot feels ready to proceed. I'm a proponent of establishing things, of not rushing in with guns blazing, but this may be an extreme example. The first act alone runs for longer than many feature films, and while there's some good character stuff in that space, it surely could've achieved the same purpose in half the time or less. The auteur’s infamously witty, cutting dialog is absent for this portion of the film, too, which may have contributed to that lethargy.
Those who tough it out are rewarded when the pace finally quickens, leading to a typically Tarantino climax - grisly, shocking and wild - but that's awfully familiar territory. For now, this director can still deliver the goods with his back up against the wall, but the time feels nigh for an evolution. He can't answer every riddle with two barrels of lead and a wet, crimson explosion... can he?
Eight western characters shoot it out over a female prisoner. One of them is the bounty hunter who wants to collect. Another is the new sheriff on his way to his new job. The black guy is an ex-Union soldier who has become a bounty hunter himself. One more is a Southern Colonel who is in search of his son. The rest are bandits in disguise looking to free the female prisoner. All of them get stranded by a snowstorm in a store on the way to town.
The spaghetti western is good enough. But then the movie tries to be something it is not. It tries to also be a patriotic movie about the civil war. Yet this theme is superimposed rather sloppily and unnecessarily. In the end, the cooperation on the hanging of the female bounty by the black veteran and the white racist sheriff doesn't need to be a symbol of the unity of the black and white races as citizens of the nascent country joining together to lynch those who truly deserve it instead of blacks. It can just be what it is: a revenge hanging by two hard-core westerners who are near death.
The best feature of this movie is the stunning cinematography --- which needs no shaky hand (as is the current questionable fashion) to make it outstanding.
A bounty hunter (Kurt Russell) and his prisoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh) take shelter in a cabin during a violent snowstorm, sharing the space with a host of shady characters.
Upon release The Hateful Eight caused quite a stir with its unusual 70mm format. Here in the UK, cinemas squabbled over who could show it and the end result was everyone lost out. This is quite the price to pay for a film trying to open at the same time as Star Wars and it seems silly for a film that takes place largely indoors.
So to the burning question: was it worth all that hassle? Yes! It’s more than just a gimmick, the wide format provides a solid frame on which to build the concept - 1 part western, 1 part end-of-an-episode-of-Poirot murder mystery. Giving us such a huge scope in such a tight space is a clever move from Tarantino; we are constantly aware of every character in the room. In that sense it’s much akin to a stage play - everyone is always in motion, always in mind.
As ever the dialogue is slick, the violence is… violent and the soundtrack is on the money. Interestingly, Tarantino takes a more subtle approach to directing than usual. In that claustrophobic environment he pays close attention to every single ray of light hitting every single object, the snow billowing in through the walls and even the fog coming from people’s mouths in the cold. Nothing is ever at rest, even if the camera isn’t moving.
The performances do a lot of the leg work. Samuel L Jackson seems to always be at the top of his game with Tarantino, same goes with Tim Roth and Michael Madsen (although Madsen’s cowboy is probably the most forgettable of the lot). Jennifer Jason Leigh stands out the most however. She’s mad but smart, and doesn’t seem to care so much about her death sentence. You can never quite tell if she’s got a trick up her sleeve or she’s just resigned to her fate.
The film is too long and Tarantino likes to go back and talk about what just happened - it starts to wear a little thin. He just doesn’t seem to know when to stop and one can’t help but feel we could perhaps drop around half an hour of the film.
However, once again his infectious passion for cinema shines through. This is a beautiful, tense, surprisingly nuanced but hate-fuelled masterpiece of a Western, and one I can’t wait to go back to.
http://benoliver999.com/film/2016/02/28/thehatefuleight/
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2016-01-04T19:12:09Z
(Note: This was the 70mm roadshow presentation of the film.)
This is a film about justice and tribalism and how the two lead to some strange, unsettling outcomes when the they are mixed together.
To the point, the film is filled with little moral thought experiments that underscore the idea of when we think it's wrong and right to kill, and explores how that's affected by which tribe they belong to. From Chris Mannix's tale of Major Warren burning down a prison, thereby killing a number of both Union and Confederate soldiers, to Warren himself goading General Smithers into trying to shoot him so he can shoot first, to Mobray's speech on dispassionate justice versus frontier justice, this is a film concerned with when dispensing lethal force is right.
But it's also concerned with how station and affiliation affect how others are treated and when something is truly just or honorable. Major West, despite his accomplishments and prowess, is derided and demeaned because of the color of his skin. Daisy Domergue is equal parts dismissed, patronized, and underestimated because she's a woman. It's no coincidence that one of the film's final scenes is a black former union soldier and a white rebel renegade cooperating to hang a woman in an excruciating fashion because it's the "right" way to honor a fallen comrade (who demeaned the both of them).
There's a lot to unpack in all of this. It's hard to say what Tarantino is saying beyond a broad level "who we are and where we're from shapes our view of what's right and who is fair game," but there's a lot there. The opening shot featuring a crucifix covered in snow hints at these broader themes, and details like the motley make up of Jody's gang to their wanton killing in order to save Jody's sibling lead in interesting thematic directions.
But apart from the larger thematic material, the film absolutely works at a basic narrative level. The first half of the film has a wonderful Clue vibe to it, with a series of characters slowly introduced and thrown together in interesting ways, where not everyone is what they seem, and the audience is left guessing, if not whodunnit, then who's going to do it.
The characters and performances are almost uniformly tremendous. Each of the major characters is well-sketched, and have interesting characteristics that lead to predictable but no less intriguing conflicts. The stand outs are Samuel L. Jackson, who is enthralling from the word go and nails the peak of the film with his monologue about the younger smithers; Jennifer Jason Leigh who gives a wonderfully unhinged performance as Daisy Domergue, and Tim Roth who has a delightful Christoph Waltz-ian flair to his bits of screen time. But everyone, from Russel to Goggins to Dern makes an impression.
The structure and performances help keep the tension high, whether in quiet moments in the stagecoach where it seems like things might become too rowdy, to the powder keg of the main cabin where mistrust grows and tempers flair. The first half of the film, where all the tension builds and is maintained, is more enjoyable than the second, where the answers are revealed, and the aftermath in interesting, but not nearly as engaging as the build of the mystery.
Still, despite (or perhaps because of) the usual Tarantino blood and guts and non-linear storytelling, the film in never boring, and while it works as a whole, the stage-like feeling of the production also allows individual scenes to feel like little vignettes, that could still be compelling or effective separated from the movie as a whole, even as they take on new meaning when juxtaposed.
I have my nits to pick -- Tatum feels a bit miscast (though his appearances are brief) and Tarantino's narration felt a bit obvious and unnecessary--but this is still a superb film from a great director. It's beautifully shot, with grand, frigid vistas that emphasize the isolation, and interesting camera movements that convey both the extra man spying on the proceedings and the heightened nerviness of individual scenes. It is also, for all its tension and thematic material, a damn funny movie, that had me chuckling more than a few times. I would not necessarily among my favorite Tarantino films, but that just speaks to the heights he's been able to hit. The Hateful Eight is still a fun, tense movie with some interesting thematic heft beneath the gunplay and quippy violence. It was well worth the cost of admission.