“The Hateful 8 70mm Roadshow” Review
“The Hateful 8” is a Tarantino movie. Why yes you might say, it is a Tarantino movie, he wrote it and directed it. But it still stands “The Hateful 8” IS a Quentin Tarantino movie. It has all the ice cold and tense dialogue, genre bending nature, intense violence, quirky characters, n-words and commentary on race and oppression that you would expect from the director. And therein lies the problem. “The Hateful 8” is so Tarantino as to feel both predictable and unoriginal. The filmmaker has plagiarized his own films to a point where we are seeing Frankenstein’s monster personified on screen.
We have the group of strangers and one-of-us-is-a-traitor from “Reservoir Dogs,” the cold western bounty hunter setting of “Django Unchained”, the dark humor and middle-start-end structure of “Pulp Fiction” and the cutting and tense dialogue of “Inglourious Basterds.” Hell, even most of the actors are the same. Nothing feels fresh, the movie has no carrying trope to define it or push it forward. Despite the good work put forward by everyone working on the film, it was simply an unsatisfying experience. Anything good I could say could be said to a greater degree about the films above. The only unique thing about “The Hateful 8” is the 70mm film, an ancient format, nearly lost in this age of digital, that provides both greater resolution and vividness to movies filmed in it. However this is bunk as the vast majority of screen time is spent inside a stagecoach or a one room cabin.
However, I still do recommend that you still see the film, particularly if you did not see it directly off a Tarantino binge. What’s right about “The Hateful 8” is right in Tarantino’s other films, which is to say, still quite a lot.