‘The Hateful Eight’ was the right event for the wrong movie
JANUARY 16TH, 2016 — POST 012
The following will contain spoliers. Consider yourself alerted.
I can’t recall the last time I was handed merch at the same time I was handed my ticket. It might have been way back in 1999 for Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. And I certainly was too young to be given the tickets directly. But I vividly remember chewing on some Jar Jar Binks-shaped gummy candy on my way to my seat.
Over 15 years later, I was walking to my seat flicking through the Roadshow booklet for The Hateful Eight — filled with set photography, notes on the format, and cast headshots. My brother, dad, and I slipping into our row, the theatre was bathed in a red from the first Tarantino-authored image of the evening: the ‘Overture’ title card.
Morricone’s score rang out like only Morricone’s scores can do. The grandiosity of his string and choir arrangments often hanging upon a lone guitar or harmonica — perfectly illustrative of the singular hero immersed in an incomprehensibly vast landscape. There’s a reason Westerns are as much Ennio Morricone as they are John Wayne or Clint Eastwood.
During the long time the card was on screen, my brother let slip out the side of his mouth “It’s already so good.” And I was feeling that too. The first motion images we see are obvious given the score, like they were shot after the orchestra was recorded. Every one of those 70 millimetres of the celluloid print ripping through the projector was bursting with the rich detail of the brutally harsh winter landscape. The camera movement is so deliberate, so unhurried, so dignified, almost antiquated. This isn’t a movie that has to grab you. This is an experience you’ve come to have.
We meet our protagonist on the road with a stack of bodies freezing in the snow behind him. A six-horse stagecoach approaches.
And then, with a speed that the opening shots would seem to suggest was impossible, we’re suddenly three people talking in the confides of a stagecoach. Then we’re four, even more tightly cramped. And soon we’ll be eight (give or take a few) in a single wooden haberdashery for the remainder of this movie’s three-hour runtime.
Here’s the problem: The audience can ultimately only feel cheated when the movie has no intention of keeping the promises it makes.
The promise a filmmaker makes in the opening sequence is critical. It is here when they tell the audience what kind of movie they’re about to get. And Tarantino is usually a master of exactly this. The tipping scene in Reservoir Dogs promises that these guys are going to talk and talk and talk and get exactly nowhere. The diner scene in Pulp Fiction promises to punctuate its long, detailed discourse with off-the-fucking-rails intensity at the end of a gun. With The Hateful Eight, Tarantino breaks as many promises as he makes.
The presentation of the movie is monumental. If you need a point of comparison, the provided booklet is happy to inform you that one of the few other films to be shot on the 70MM format was Ben-Hur, a film whose scale should be evident from the over 10 000 people employed just as extras. Yet The Hateful Eight will make do with around less than twenty cast total. If this was the only promise the movie makes and breaks — that of its scale — it would be a pity, but not disastrous. I mean, I had a niggling feeling in the lead up to the movie’s release that I would almost certainly find some issue that would have me (albiet irrationally) claiming the format was wasted. No, there are far more significant promises in which I simply felt cheated.
— SPOILERS AFTER IMAGE —
The most obvious of these was when Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L Jackson) has his testicles unceremoniously blasted off by a bullet shot from a revolver in the hand of an individual hiding in a part of the habedashery I had no indication even existed. Okay, I know, the actor who plays this character had his name in the opening credits and if I wasn’t so dumb I wouldn’t have been so surprised, but when you make a promise that we’re dealing with eight hateful individuals, don’t have the plot turn on the actions of a nineth hereto unseen. Or at the very least, give me a clue that there’s more to this haberdashery than the one room, the stable, and the outhouse. Also, why did the Hateful Ninth wait until then to spring? Additionally, if Major Warren knew about the habedashery’s owner Minnie not liking Mexicans, even if he’s greeted by one when he arrives, or that the stew tasted exactly like he remembered Minnie’s tasting, even though The Mexican said Minnie had been gone for weeks, why does he wait so long to do anything about it?
I have a suspicion that the Hateful Ninth and Major Warren have the same penchant for contrived dramatic tension as Tarantino himself.
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