The Hateful Eight: 70mm Roadshow

Inglorious Bastards is still my favorite Tarantino movie but The Hateful Eight comes in a close second. The thing with this movie is it's really just Tarantino patting himself on the back the whole time. It is a really amazing movie, but at times I was thinking, this is just for him isn't it? There is nothing unoriginal about this movie, like most of his other movies. Every little twist that happens throws you off a little bit more; it's so filled with events that will throw you, that the best summary someone can get without spoiling anything is that a bounty hunter has caught a woman who is worth $10,000 and due to a blizzard, is forced to stop in a log cabin where seven other people also congregate because of the blizzard. The basic conflict of the movie is that this bounty hunter is super paranoid that someone is working with his captive woman to set her free. Any more explanation past that would ruin some sort of revelation in the film.

I also saw this movie in 70mm film, which means that the movie was captured in super wide screen, this type of film captures the most color and I'm pretty sure it also looks the most realistic. I've heard that there have been several issues with the 70mm Roadshow in that a lot of people around the country don't know how to operate film very well. My group had to travel 45 minutes to a place that was showing the movie on film and there weren't really any issues other than a little hair at the bottom of the screen. There is about 15 minutes more of footage in the film version that is changed or just left out in the digital version. I personally thought the few lines of dialogue that were left out in the digital release were interesting additives to the situation but obviously not crucial--they just helped the audience realize and pay attention to some things that you wouldn't notice otherwise.

The character arcs in this movie were phenomenal. I personally really enjoyed Walton Goggins' characters arc because it comes out of absolutely nowhere, but everyone's got a really interesting story and development. The only problem I had was that one character in particular got no development really, at all, which just made it super obvious who he was later in the film. I particularly like the character development in this movie because, as the title suggests, every person cooped up in this cabin is not a good person. Samuel L. Jackson's character seems like the most likable out of the group, but you learn pretty quickly he's done some pretty heinous things. I think the whole concept that you aren't really rooting for any of the characters in any situation is a fun concept as an audience member--it forces you to focus on basically everything else more closely because you don't have all your hopes on the survival of one character in particular.
The cinematography in The Hateful Eight kept the consistent setting interesting. There's only so much you can do in regards to shot composition when 70% of your movie takes place in one, closed off, log cabin. There were birds-eye-view shots, there were some attention grabbing tracking shots, which you would think, how much of a tracking shot can be done within a tiny log cabin--turns out some pretty cool ones. Outside of the log cabin there were long establishing shots of the mountains and the trails our characters were traveling on, and there were a ton of cool perspective shots. The point is there was a lot done with the small amount of "sets" they had. The cabin setting could have gotten pretty old pretty fast if the same shot were used every frame of the movie. One of my favorite shots is a slow motion capture of a black and a white horse running through the snow in the very beginning of the movie.
The story in this movie is so unique and so out-of-nowhere it's hard to give much of any kind of synopsis because so many little things happen that build up in the first 90 minutes you have no idea Tarantino has given us all these clues that will eventually lead to the huge blowout in Chapter 4. I really couldn't predict what the conflict of this movie would be and what I guessed would happen was nowhere near what actually happened. I love Tarantino for his completely unique stories--who thinks to have a minor character, who doesn't even speak when they are introduced to the audience, be the catalyst for everything else in the film (Inglorious Bastards--if you haven't seen it shame on you). Each time I see a Tarantino film I am continually amazed by the way the story is puzzled together from all these different little fragments.
Something that should be kept in mind when going to see this movie is that it will get better, I promise. The first 90 minutes is pure character development. Really, nothing happens besides a whole lot of talking. You have to be invested in this movie and know that once past the 90 minute mark, things start getting a whole lot more Tarantino. That's one of the reasons I like Inglorious Bastards more than The Hateful Eight because Inglorious Bastards gets right to the point and it's much easier to casually watch; there is no doubting it is Quentin Tarantino's brain child. But since I wanted to see The Hateful Eight because it is Tarantino's eighth film, it wasn't hard to get through the 90 minutes of talking and plot exposition. I watch Inglorious Bastards to hear jokes and laugh and to see an interpretation of WWII and watch Brad Pitt; I see The Hateful Eight to watch how Tarantino is progressing as a filmmaker and to see where he may be going next.

I think it's pretty clear that in order to fully take what this movie has to offer you have to be invested some way in the movie, whether it's to see the eighth Tarantino film or you really like westerns or something. I brought two of my friends to the digital screening and I could tell they were both pretty over it at some parts. Some of the dialogue and seemingly unnecessary exposition seems like Quentin Tarantino wrote that or shot that for nobody else besides Quentin Tarantino, but that's part of the fun of seeing a Quentin Tarantino movie. Everything he does he finds great. I want to watch anything that Quentin Tarantino puts into a movie because he thinks it's great. And if you really want to see the Quentin Tarantino violence parts and not the Quentin Tarantino writer parts then just put the first 90 minutes on as background noise to making dinner or something and then sit down and experience the bloodbath that is the second half of the movie.