'The Hateful Eight' - Film review

The Hateful Eight is Quentin Tarantino's eighth movie, starring Samuel L Jackson, that guy from Lie to Me and Channing Tatum. It tells the story… well that's a little bit complicated actually.

What's cooler than being cool?

What makes a synopsis so difficult is this film is very, very long - almost 3 hours in fact. To sum it up in any sort of concise fashion: it's two bounty hunters (one of whom is a black Unionist cavalier) taking a wanted murder (Daisy Domergue) alive to Red Rock, an outpost in Wyoming some time after the American Civil War, when a blizzard descends and they have to seek shelter. On the way they pick up a Confederate captain (who proudly calls himself a rebel warrior) who claims to have been called on to be sherif of Red Rock. The troop of 4, that's 4/8, find shelter in the form of a haberdashery, where the other 4/8 are also sheltered, including a Confederate general and a travelling hangman, who happens to be due to hang Domergue when the bounty hunters and sherif bring her to Red Rock. However, with the 8 shuttered in against a storm, a spat of murders makes the bounty hunters realise that transporting Domergue may have more complications than expected… As you can see, it's hard to sum up.


Maybe as a veteran Shakespeare-watcher I'm not one to complain about productions in the 160+ minute zone, but there were some parts of The Hateful Eight which were undeniably quite slow. Noticeably slow, for maybe the first two chapters. The last 3 chapters are where it really steps up and you barely notice time passing from the start of chapter 3 to the end, but until then it does drag a bit. However, those first two slow chapters were important and necessary - as with Reservoir Dogs Tarantino breathes life into his characters like Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, fleshing out 8 wildly different characters to the audience without a single line which sounded like forced exposition. The first two chapters draw the characters so well that eventually every character is a protagonist, or has the interest and sympathy of the audience, so the end chapters aren't just 'oh the culprit has to be the character we know the least about': the characters are all so fascinating and complex that there's genuine wonderment as to which way the plot's going to go. The first chapters had to be slow to layer on meaning into the events of the last chapters, but that doesn't avoid the fact that the first chapters are still slow, which would put me off watching it more than once in a short space of time - it's a great film, but it might be a while between viewings when you can put yourself through the slow parts.

Slow parts aside, it's great to see Tarantino's still got it on his eighth movie, whatever 'it' is, we're sure we're seeing the art of a master. The movie has his definitive directorial stamp on it with that bold, individual graphical style, used in this case to give it the look of a vintage movie, and the film looks great from this standpoint as well in terms of locations and cinematographies, creating the feel of the pioneering west better than most westerns I've seen. I spent a while searching for this word after watching the film, but it's a very cohesive movie, every aspect feeding into a central message in a manner which makes it one piece of art, by which I mean one piece of art which doesn't go off message or suffer distractions. I may be wrong, but it sounded a lot like Tarantino himself was the narrator which cropped up once or twice after chapter 3 which really leads to the effect of all the Tarantino films I've seen - he isn't just making a film, he is specifically telling a story to the audience through specific images on screen, a sign of a truly great director. Here it also has the effect of us literally being told a story, which again to the aesthetic of a western creates a fantastic image of Tarantino sat at some saloon or trading post relating the story of The Hateful Eight to an audience of settlers on the Oregon trail. In some ways the film feels very sentimental, but with potentially only two more Tarantino films left this feels like you're definitely being included in something special and personal here.

Something else the film gets very right is a sense of historical immersion, a very deep immersion of the audience into the world of The Hateful Eight. Compared to historically and geographically recognisable settings such as East Berlin and the Berlin Wall in Bridge of Spies, this was probably easier to maintain for The Hateful Eight with a cast of at most 20 characters focussed on one very secluded location. Nonetheless, just the image of the chartered stage coach charging through the wasteland of rural Wyoming was enough to transport the film across space and time to 19th century West. As ever with Tarantino there has to be a discussion on the use of racial epithets*, in this case how they're used entirely judiciously in correct historical contexts to add not only to a sense of immersion in the attitudes of the time but also contributing to that cohesive sense of the meaning of the piece as a whole. Set in the aftermath of the oft-referenced 'unconditional surrender' of the Confederates in the civil war, the bristling nature of these attitudes makes an awful lot of sense.

This brings us neatly round to discussing the meaning of the film as a whole. During the film some of the use of gratuitous violence seems a little superfluous, as if it doesn't add anything to the film as a whole (whereas all the violence in Reservoir Dogs definitely did); it isn't until the final climactic showdown between the three 'survivors' that the meaning really becomes self-evident. Without giving too much away about specific circumstances, the violence, the ignorance, the hatred of the film have a specific meaning about the nature of how factions divide people and create and destroy allegiances (the sides of the civil war, the Domergue gang, etc.) - how when these are thrown away, every human is just a human with the same will for life as any other. In fact, the ending is a great reconciliation between the two most opposed characters in the film, drawn together by hardship to see their similarities, such that the cathartic fade to black was in a way blissful, with the perfectly apt credits song hammering home the message that the whole film was talking about in every aspect.

It might seem that this is philosophising too deeply about a Tarantino film, but such themes can also be found in the violence of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Though British audiences may not realise this, as I didn't when I sat down to watch this after its January release date, this film is after all in its way a Christmas movie (released in December in the US), and that message and lovely tied-up close to the film really tell you that. It's an oddly beautiful film, with certain moments which stand out as being particularly sentimentally and that strange sadistic fashion of Tarantino's. One particular image that I certainly can't get out of my head is that beautiful moment of Jackson's character relating the fate of the confederate general's son to a backing of one of the Eight playing a haltering rendition of Silent Night on the haberdashery's piano. It was a beautiful moment which stayed with me as I was travelling home - something about the universal language of mankind, the sad truth that these man will never be able to properly connect with each other with the way they talk, all that philosophical crap - nonetheless, The Hateful Eight definitely has a soul.

The Lincoln Letter gives the film something like a circular narrative, and again contributes to the film's message about undeniable humanity. To reiterate, this film is cohesive as a work of art, and has a definite soul. Therefore, I'm giving it a 9/10 (4/5…) as I can't justify that it's as good as Reservoir Dogs but it is a thoroughly excellent film and I wholly recommend watching it. Coming soon are reviews of The Danish Girl and Bridge of Spies, and I really want to go and see The Revenant having seen a less serious recent Western and seeing how they compare.

Please feel free to comment what you agree or disagree with, I'd be delighted to discuss, and you can leave your email address to be notified of replies or comment anonymously if you'd prefer. More reviews coming soon :)

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*My English coursework at A-level was an analysis of Pup Fiction, hence I know the terminology.